This story will be in three parts, and is most certainly rated M. It makes reference to Puccini's Madama Butterfly, and follows the structure of an Opera, but it's hardly inspired by the opera itself.

I was never satisfied with the idea that Cora asked 'Are we okay Robert?' and that was the end of it. That has to be the least satisfying thing.

Please read, enjoy, and comment if the notion takes you.

Act 1 - The Opera

Alien is the word they use for the faceless thousands pouring into Ellis Island. She remembers watching the curling line, seemingly endless, as her steamer surged away from the dock, past the statue, carrying her away from everything she knew. Her mother had stood by her side as they watched New York disappear, Martha's expectations so huge that Cora could almost touch them, and she tried to have hope and excitement when all she had truly felt was trepidation.

What title, she wondered, would be attributed to her after her debut in London?

It turns out it was Lady Grantham, though sometimes she thinks it might be synonymous with alien.

She was an émigré in reverse; bringing her own economy into a dying one, presented as a life-line to a haemorrhaging way of life. A pretty, witty, clever life-line.

And as much a part of it as she feels – a society lady, an established member of the British aristocracy – she also feels simultaneously alien, untethered from any identity she used to wear, and not quite fitting the one she is supposed to don.

She casts her eyes across the small space to her husband and watches him as he gazes out of the window, eyes following the river as it passes under London Bridge.

She wonders what his thoughts are, and it occurs to her – not for the first time in recent months – that she does not know her husband as thoroughly as she used to assume.

And the pain that revelation leaves in its wake is almost breath taking.

After all of this time, the sudden realisation that her husband may not be the man she thought he was has set her adrift in the solid life she thought she had built.

But then, she's barely had a moment to contemplate that. Her body has taken its time to heal, and even now as she shifts in her seat, she feels a deep ache in her bones, brought by the war, and the flu, and all the indelicate changes wrought upon them by the incomparable challenges of conflict.

And the silent agony she holds to herself; that her husband has loved someone else, someone prettier, and far more attentive, and far more pliant.

She cannot decide which emotion better fits the revelation: humiliation, pain, anger, despondency, surprise or pity, because all of them vie equally for position every time she dares think about what she knows, and he thinks she is ignorant of.

She watches him still, the softer lines of his face, the concentration as he takes in Covent Garden in all its winter glory.

And though she is tempted to reach for his hand, she does not.

If she is honest with herself, she is entirely glad to be free of the heavy constraints of Downton. London is shabbier now, ravaged with war, fraying around its typically polished edges; it reminds her of New York, with its ragged souls and its hungry searching. Here, she almost feels like she belongs. In Downton, despite all of her efforts – most of which have been a success – she never really ceases to feel just a little bit like an outsider.

Émigré. Alien. Lady Grantham.

"Are you excited?" He asks, just as their cab comes to a standstill outside of the Royal Opera House.

She pities him in that moment, pities his ignorance and his pride and his clear attempts at soothing a wound he thinks she does not know about.

Never one to disappoint, she dresses her mouth in a tired smile, "Absolutely."

He nods, and they both know the disconnect between them is there because neither will discuss the huge chasm they are slowly quarrying in their marriage.

She does not think she should be the first one to step into the abyss, and she does not know how to tell her husband – her kind, imperious, stubborn, adoring, brute of a husband – what she knows.

And what she has fabricated in the absence of facts. Lurid, fabulously torturous, nightmares she has in spite of her desire never to dream again. Did he touch the maid as he used to touch her? Did her lick and suck and kiss his way into her heart and her affections? Did he whisper his wants into her pale skin as he used to do with Cora?

"Rosamund said the box is very good," he offers his arm, and she takes it dutifully.

"I'm sure it will be."

"Are you cold?" He asks, joining the heaving crowd flowing into the golden lobby of the Opera House.

"Don't fuss," she says, with a bite she wishes would leave her voice. "I am more than content."

Of course, they both know that is a lie.

"What is on the bill tonight?" She asks, having not paid attention to what he had said earlier this afternoon, when he was proposing this meticulously-planned-to-appear-spontaneous evening.

"Madama Butterfly."

She can hear him struggle over the words, the very heavy foreignness of it all. The opera is so un-English, so entirely unlike something Robert would enjoy.

And while she should focus on the sacrifice in the act, the olive branch he is extending, all she can focus on is how foreignness seems to appal him.

And what that says about their union.

She was enough once: pretty, pliant, fertile, rich.

Now, she's not much more than a millstone he is obliged to maintain to save face.

And in spite of any evidence he might give her to the contrary, in the moments he tells her he loves her, or when he takes her hands in his, or when he holds her rigid body, or when he nursed her so gently back to health from Spanish flu, she knows it to be true.

She suspects, even, the pleading in his very blue eyes is fabricated from a sense of obligation, as opposed to love.

And all she ever wanted, all she ever needed, was for Robert to love her.

"Do you know the plot?" He asks.

She does, she read about it in The Sketch, and she knows instantly he does not. He would never have chosen this.

"I do."

She cradles her champagne in her fingers and feels him shift nearer to her. The box is indeed spectacular, and exclusively theirs for the evening, and as the darkness enrobes them, she finally breathes – relieved to be free of his scrutiny, and the shackles of being Lady Grantham and being pleasant and pretending that her very heart isn't on fire with pain.

But then the music begins, and as it continues and surges and dives over elegant notes and terrible tragedies, tears begin flowing down her face. A catharsis, a release, permitting her to feel all the pain she has been gathering in her bones.

She understand the betrayal so perfectly. She has lived with the desire for love from a man who can't quite give of himself entirely, because cultural divides stop him at every turn. She has lived the reality of sacrificing your own body, and your own dreams, and your own desires, for his.

She understands it so perfectly, and her tears are an acknowledgement of that.

She feels his fingers on her cheek, brushing them away, as he leans into her.

"Don't cry my darling."

And in the darkness, and through the ebb and flow of music that is eating into her heart and bones, and in the exhaustion of constantly fighting against her own anger, she finally finds courage.

"Robert, I know."