XIII:

"Even if I could go to the christening – which I cannot because how could I possibly get into and out of the church, Charles? – I've got no clothes at all that fit me and I'll be damned to hell for all eternity before I sit in the house of God in my nightgown, dressing gown, and slippers," Elsie said, her voice quavering despite the firmness of her words. "No, I'll stay here. You must go for the both of us. They wouldn't want me in the photos, anyway – some old woman in a push chair, ruining their lovely photos. Not exactly the best impression for the nobility to have sitting on a side table, and we all know how the honor of the family is –"

"Elsie, calm yourself, please," Charles said earnestly, trapping her wildly flailing hands in his and holding them still. "Dearest, look at me. Look at me." He waited until she did just that, finally, hesitantly peeping up from beneath her eyelashes. "I know you are worried, but the details will resolve themselves." It had only been a week since their wedding and her incessant need to know every little thing about what was going on around her – because she was absolutely stir-crazy in her hospital bed – was beginning to drive him mad.

"I have spent my life in service to the details," she reminded him with no small amount of acidity to her tone, "and they do not just resolve themselves."

"You do not need to be involved in planning out every little detail," he said softly. "You cannot be involved, love – not from your bed. It isn't practical."

"Oh, but it's practical for me to be dragged out of my bed to go on a dog and pony show when it's convenient for the blessed family, then?" Elsie said, her frown deepening and tears beginning to form in her eyes. "Charlie… I am trying – I am."

"I know you are, Elsie, love," he assured her softly.

"But I've no' got the strength to –"

"Dearest," he interrupted.

"I wish you'd stop doin' that!" she exploded, yanking her hands out of his and jabbing one of her index fingers viciously into his chest. "Always cuttin' me off and tellin' me what I do and don't mean like I dinnae hae me own mind. My memory may be a little bit broken, Charles Carson, but my mental faculties are fully intact, let me tell you – and I'll tell you another thing. I will worry about whatever I so choose. You might be my husband, but you cannae bully me and order me about like a big lout of a man just because I am stuck in this bed and cannae leave without your assistance. D'ye hear me? I love you, but by God, right now, I hate the very sight o'ye. Go away. Get ou'. Le'me alone, damn you, Charlie."

He sat back and sighed; she was being irrational and unreasonable, and had been since the nurse had worn her out earlier with exercises and all but forced her to eat a small bowl of stew. Dr. Clarkson had had enough of Elsie's seeming willfulness not to get better at all, and was going to force the issue, much to Charles's dismay – he knew just how stubborn Elsie Hughes could, and would, be if pushed to her limits, and he did not want to endure a breakdown of their marriage quite so soon, if you please. "I am not going anywhere," Charles said, "so you may cease throwing your tantrum at any point in time because it is only succeeding in making you look quite ridiculous, Elsie."

"I am not throwing a tantrum." She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.

"What would you call it, then?"

"I am very cross with you because you willnae take any of my concerns seriously and treat me like I am nothing more than an invalid infant – and I am no' as bad as that," she spat, her voice deepening as her accent crept in thicker and heavier with emotion.

"You won't do as the doctor says you need to in order to begin to progress in getting better – like eating. Why won't you eat?" he challenged, gesturing between them. "You barely pick at your food, and I practically had to threaten you earlier to get you to eat that stew –"

"I eat broth and crackers – it isn't as if I'm starving mesel'," she scoffed.

A thousand retorts flew through his mind, each angrier than the last. He finally settled on, "Elsie, you weigh less than 7 stone."

"Aye, you have a thin wife," she said with a wry smile. "That should please you, Mr. Carson."

"Indeed it does not," Charles said. "Not when I have spent so many hours remembering with fondness the delectable roundness and curve of my lovely wife's lush bottom and – Mrs. Carson, please do not take this as censure, because it is not. I am concerned and I love you as much as I can love another being not of my own body; please tell me why you will not eat and try to regain your strength, for my sake if not your own." He reached over and stroked her forearm kindly with such tenderness he thought he might die with frustration if she did not acknowledge his overture.

She hesitated and sighed. "Do you really love my… bottom so much, Charles?"

"Elsie, I love every bit of you," he said. "From your head to your toes, your fingers to your nose. Of course I love your bottom – it also has the distinction of being one of the few pieces of you that I was allowed to caress intimately during our indiscretion."

She blushed very prettily then and bit back a small smile. But just as quickly, she became serious again. "I don't want to eat because it hurts," Elsie confessed in a tiny voice. "I get such bad heartburn even from the broth and crackers, and every time I try to eat anything more substantial, my throat burns all the way down into my stomach like it's on fire. It's all I can do to keep anything at all down, Charlie, and I'm scared. I'm terrified I'll no' be able to recover from this. And you want me to, so badly – but I can only fight so many battles. I'm losing the war."

His heart very nearly ceased to beat upon hearing the truth leave her lips; how could he not have realized, how could he not have known that she was in so much pain just from eating? Charles reached out and stroked her hair and whispered, "Elsie, why didn't you say?"

"I cannae bear to disappoint you again," she murmured, looking away from him. "Ye never come out an' say that ye are, because ye're too good to me, Charlie, but I know ye are. Ye get a look on yer face an' ye don' look me in the eye."

"I am disappointed in myself," he sighed, "because I cannot help. Because there is nothing more I can do to help."

"Well, you married an old frail woman, so there is another disappointment to add to your pile, Charles," she whispered, unwilling to look at him. "My stomach is burning from the stew I ate earlier and I'm struggling not to be sick. The only thing I know is if I am to vomit, it will pain me so much worse than now."

It hit him then, with force, deep in the heart, a pain that enveloped his being. "Oh god," Charles managed to profane as he lowered his face into his hands. "Elsie, please forgive me – dearest, please… I didn't… I wasn't thinking," he stammered.

She turned to face him, her eyes swimming with tears. "What are you on about?" Elsie muttered.

"I've been thinking like the doctor, like the nurses – about how you need to recover and get back to your old self and… and I just realized that with everything that has happened, with the damages your body sustained, you cannot possibly go back to being just as you were," he said. "And we are foolish to force you to attempt to try."

She looked at him with dark suspicion in her eyes, the start of a sneer on her lips. "Oh really?" The sarcasm practically radiated off of her in waves. "You just now came to that conclusion? Very kind of you to notice, Charlie, that my debilitating disabilities are probably not just going to go away – especially after I've been tellin' you that I cannae do things."

"Elsie –"

"Why do ye think I'm so angry wi' the worl'?" she snapped. "Why do ye think I seriously thought about goin' to a home in York instead of marryin' ye? Because I'm no' going to get better in the way ye hoped. And it's no' fair to make false promises in the face of God, is it? No' even when you love someone."

He leaned in and cupped her face in his hands, gently turning her to face him. "Better is an arbitrary term," Charles whispered. "We can use it to define your recovery however you wish, Elsie – if you want to walk, we can use it for that. If you want to be able to eat without pain, we can use it for that. If you want to remember coming to Downton…"

"I've tried," Elsie whispered. "The last thing I remember is leaving Glasgow but that was in '92, long before… I know I was at the farm when Mam had her cancer and that was two years, but… I dinnae remember comin' to Downton or –"

"You were in London before Downton," he said softly, "with the Painswicks."

"Was I?" Elsie said, her brow furrowed. "I dinnae recall."

"It's all right, dearest – Rome wasn't built in a day, despite the rumor," he assured her, giving her a kiss.

"It's like walking along and running into a cavernous hole in the ground," she sighed, leaning into him as he joined her on the bed, holding her gently as to not upset her stomach further. "And if you jump into it, you dinnae know how deep it is or how low down the light will go or if you'll ever stop fallin'… so you just skirt 'roun' the edge and run away till you run intae the nex' one. An' there are so many holes like that in me mem'ry."

"I know, love," he whispered, breathing the ghost of a kiss over her cheek, making her moan in soft appreciation. "If I could do anything to help, I would…"

"Do you know why I came to Downton?" she asked, her brow furrowing.

"Lady Rosamund asked it as a special favor is all I know," Charles said gently. "But you don't remember, do you?"

Elsie shook her head, looked down at her hands. "I cannae remember. I don' remember much of the first year I were here."

Charles tucked her head under his chin and held her close. "You arrived on the third of April, in the middle of a torrential storm," he said softly, "a day earlier than we were expecting you because Lady Rosamund got the dates wrong and sent you ahead. Instead of hiring a hansom at the station, you walked – it hadn't begun to rain yet, and you'd felt you could traverse two miles from the village to the house before it did. Unfortunately, it began to pour rain halfway through your journey, and by the time you reached the Abbey, you and your things were beyond soaked."

"I must have been such a mess," Elsie sighed. "You must have been horrified."

"The other servants were horrified, dearest – I was busy serving tea in the library when you arrived." He smiled wanly. "By the time I came downstairs, everything was abuzz with how uncouth the new Head Housemaid was, being from Scotland and covered in mud and soaked to the bone. You were in the Housekeeper's sitting room in your underpinnings and her housecoat while your things dried when I came in to introduce myself."

Her breathing changed slightly, and she murmured, "Were you terribly shocked?"

"By your state of undress perhaps, yes… By your beauty, definitely," he said. She had been a revelation: in the light of the fire and the candles, she had been all pale cheekbones and hair aglow like flames of wine, her body lush curves barely contained by the dressing gown and god, how he had wanted such things that had shamed him at the time. Now, he knew that it had been more than just animal lust and yearnings, but then? Then, he had been so angry with himself for feeling such things. "I could not understand why a woman of your loveliness was not already married."

She laughed and sighed. "Ah, well… you know now." She snuggled closer to him. "I wish I remembered more," Elsie whispered.

"I am afraid you don't," he said. "I was not exactly kindness to you that first year."

"No matter," she said softly. "It was still time we spent together, Charles. And I would give anything to have it back, even if it wasn't the kindest of times."

"When you were promoted to Housekeeper, everything changed," he said softly.

"Did it?"

"We were equals." He held her hand, twining their fingers together. "And you were not afraid to put me in my place when needed – but, oh, how it smarted, getting bested by a slip of a woman."

"I never was a slip of a woman, Charlie," Elsie chuckled. "A bit too fond of me food, I was. Probably why you were so fond of my bottom." He could hear the smile in her teasing tone, was glad of it.

"You invited me to your sitting room for a glass of whiskey and a negotiation of hostilities in preemption of a cease fire," he said, "and you just kept flitting about, moving things around and shuffling like a nervous butterfly."

"Ah, yes," Elsie said, swallowing hard. "We'd been arguing about something stupid that wasn't going to resolve itself without concessions on both sides, and I felt I should be the bigger man and be the first to concede ground. I don't even remember what we were fighting about."

"Neither do I," Charles replied, smiling. "It doesn't matter much, considering it ended so pleasantly…"

"Ah, yes, with both of us more than slightly tiddly on the grog and me w'me skirts around me waist and you w'yer hands all over me bum," Elsie mumbled.

"Elsie Carson," Charles rumbled low in his throat, "I'll have you know, I was not as drunk as all that, and neither were you. Two small scotches have never been enough to derail either of us."

Her thumb had been caressing the back of his hand; it stilled abruptly, and her breath shuddered to a quick halt. "What are you… what do you… what do you mean, Charles?"

"I think enough time has gone by for us to be honest with ourselves and each other; we shouldn't be blaming the drink for something we both clearly wanted and needed," Charles said softly, disjointed memories dancing across his mind like torn up bits of the flicker show. "We ignored the rules and made love, and then, we went back into our proper little boxes and were the perfect, proper servants. And the whole time, all I wanted was to offer you my hand and drag you away to a new adventure, Elsie. Somewhere we didn't have to pretend to not care about one another –"

"Oh, Charlie, you silly man, I always cared," she whispered. "Why do ye think ye never had to mend yer socks and undershorts?"

His brow furrowed. "That was you?"

"I always caught them before they made it to the mending pile," Elsie murmured.

"Why did we waste so much time?" His frustration was palpable, like a living, growing thing between them. He had loved her for so long, had stomped down his feelings and kept them in check by sheer force of willpower, and for what? Why? "Elsie…"

"Because it wasnae right and it wasnae proper," she said softly. "It shouldnae have happened, Charlie – I should never have kissed you."

He closed his eyes and inhaled, pressing his nose to the top of her head and just breathing in for a long moment. "I am ever so glad you did," Charles rumbled against her hair. "It was wonderful, Elsie, that kiss. Like every bit of heaven come down to earth just for me."

"I think ye'r givin' me far too much credit – I barely knew where to put me lips," she scoffed.

"Do you know how lovely your voice is when you aren't trying to hide your accent?" Charles asked, squeezing her fingers with his. "It's like ancient fairies – or – "

"More like a crone," Elsie chuckled. "I sound like some old witcher woman from the ol' mill, Charlie, and no better than I ought to be." She sighed and murmured, "We were very poor, we were. Barely had the clothes on our backs and the beasties on the land. Only reason I had shoes was because Mam begged them from the mission barrels while Becky were in school in London." She shook her head and sighed again. "I tried so hard to not be wild, Charles, but I never lost the feelin' of the wind in me hair or the peat 'tween me toes."

"Well, you don't have to worry any longer about anything like that," he whispered. "You're safe – and Becky is safe. We are secure for the foreseeable future, and I have worked with Mr. Matthew to make provisions for you and Becky should something happen to me." Charles frowned and kissed the top of her head. "My grandmum was born on the home farm," he said. "She was the sixteenth of eighteen, and the scrawniest little thing that ever drew breath according to her sisters. When she was five, she was sent to the big house to train as a scullery maid, and she was taking out the scraps and lighting fires from then till she was eight. After that, she did the fires and began to wash dishes. All of her money went back to the farm, until she was fifteen. Then she was allowed to keep a stipend to pay for her own uniform, and for new shoes. By then, she was a kitchen maid and learning how to prepare ingredients. By the time she was thirty, she was the head cook and married – very briefly – to the head groom. He died in a hunting accident not long after my father was born. She kept her position until she had a severe stroke and became paralyzed in part of her body." He took a deep breath. "I was very young and my parents thought that it would do me good to spend time with her. I didn't want to – I wanted to be with the other boys my own age, and I know now it was horribly selfish of me. I was a terrible child, Elsie, and I hated every second I spent nursing Granny."

"You were just a little boy," she murmured. "She knew you didn't mean annathin' you said in anger, Charlie. You loved her verra much. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry."

"I am trying to do better by you, Elsie – but it is so difficult."

"You mean that I'm difficult," she supplied.

"No –"

"Oh, don't deny it." She sighed heavily and snuggled even closer to him. "I am impossible, Charles, and you can say so. It must have been much easier when you could just put a tube down me and pour gruel into my stomach."

He shook his head and sighed. "That's probably why you're so sick now," he said. "I should never have let it happen, Elsie – I should never have –"

"But then I would have wasted away."

He laughed, the sound bitter and hollow. "Just like you are now?"

"Touché," she agreed wryly.

"I'll speak to Mrs. Patmore tomorrow and see what she can come up with that might soothe your throat, like a custard or a fruit jelly," he said softly. "Anything to help you eat."

"No stew, please," she murmured. "I've got such heartburn you wouldn't believe."

"No stew," he agreed. "But we need to find something –"

"Oh god, yes, I am famished," she sighed, "but the idea of trying to… oh, I don't think I can even think about it, Charles."

He frowned and kissed her head again. "Elsie?"

"Hmm?"

"O'Brien and Anna have been working on a new dress for you to wear to Master George's christening," he said. "It should be finished tomorrow. It was meant to be a surprise."

"But, Charles, how ever am I to participate in the ceremony such as I am?" she asked with trepidation. "Won't it be –"

"It will not be a problem for Lady Mary or Mr. Matthew," Charles promised. "And Dr. Clarkson has arranged for a push chair to be taken for inside the church, and one for outside the church."

"Two? What a waste!" Elsie said, biting her lip.

"Dearest," Charles said, scowling down into her hair, "it is the only feasible way with that many steps. I will carry you inside."

"But your back –"

"You weigh far less than you'd like to believe," he pointed out.

"Why are you doing this – why…?"

"Dearest, you are George's godmother, and you deserve to be there," Charles said. "It is as simple as that. And Lady Mary and Mr. Matthew refused to take no for an answer, so we have been trying tirelessly to make it happen while keeping you unaware of the details because…"

"Because I have been a depressed stick in the mud?" she challenged.

"Because you have been a bit challenging," he amended.

"Oh, Charlie, you are too good for the likes of me," she lamented, burrowing as closely into him as possible without inhabiting his clothing with him. "I dinnae know what I did to deserve you –"

He gave her another kiss and smiled. "No more of that talk, if you please, Mrs. Carson, for it is patently untruth, and my lovely wife shouldn't lie," he said softly. "Now… rest, love, and then we'll see about more broth and crackers until I can speak to Beryl."