All I do is try, try, try

A few hours later, Cora was still by his bedside. She sat lounging in the chair he had thrown over in his rage two nights before, her cloth-bound volume of J.M. Barrie's Dear Brutus closed in her lap as she was about to nod off. She had spent the night watching over her husband, barely getting even a wink of sleep, and her exhaustion was finally catching up with her.

But then, he began to stir.

Slowly, he came to and thought himself to be quite disoriented. It took him a solid minute to realise that he was not in his dressing room at Downton, nor in fact anywhere in Yorkshire.

Dark clouds lined the sky outside as far as he could see out the window, hiding the sun and casting a gloomy spell over the city. It was only a matter of time before heavy rain would make the streets below less crowded, while large puddles formed everywhere in a matter of minutes, filling the holes in the street. The less light flooding the room, though, was quite welcome for Robert; it didn't cause him quite as bad a headache as he had had earlier, and it made looking around the room for orientation far easier. Thus, it did not take him all that long to let his gaze wander and recognise the room as his dressing room at Grantham House. Then, he saw her sleepy figure sitting so close to him, and he could not help but be confused. Had she indeed been more than a mere hallucination the night before? Or was he still dreaming and hallucinating?

Sounding quite disoriented, he whispered: "What are you…?"

"I came here to find you," she replied softly, suddenly wide awake again. Making to stand, she added: "Let me get you a glass of water first."

"No!" he then said firmly, which put her back in her seat immediately. The realisation that she was there in the room with him suddenly filled him with previously unrivalled aversion, not to mention anger. He had left her as requested, and now she followed him there? He could not make any sense of it. And he didn't really want to. All he wanted was for her to leave him vegetate here in peace. She could have everything. The abbey, their family, simply everything. He'd give it all to her, freely, as long as she left him be. Was that not what she had wanted?

His blue eyes coldly rested on her face when he sat up and bluntly asked the question burning on his tongue: "Why? Why did you come?"

"I already said. I came here to find you. Do you have any idea how worried we all were?"

Robert sat up further in bed, his upper body now resting flush against the headboard. He would have already gone to stand if his head wasn't still throbbing so vehemently, although considerably less than earlier. He hadn't cared the night before that he would be hungover; he would have likely cured that fact with even more whiskey upon first waking up, or at least that had been his plan. But now he very well couldn't, and the powder she had given him seemed to help at least slightly.

However, if she was here now, Matthew wouldn't have been a figment of his imagination the night before, either. And wherever he went, Mary was never far. It wouldn't do for them to see him like this, after he had been drunk out of his mind.

Even though he was still slightly confused by it all, his simmering anger was slowly getting the better of him and her words only stoked the fire within. "You? Worried?" he spat. "Isn't this what you wanted?"

Cora gulped. He wasn't far off. For weeks, she had wanted him gone, out of her sight. And she had been wrong in ever wishing for that amid her all-encompassing grief, that much she now knew. Her fingers began to toy with the pages of the book in her lap, and she internally had to congratulate herself for her magnificent talent in unintentionally always picking stories and plays to read that fit her current situation maybe a bit too well. She had not quite reached the point where the characters knew whether their life choices had been made for the better or not. The irony was not lost on her, although she hoped to be one step ahead of the Purdies, the Coades and the Dearths.

Unlike them, hopefully, she felt she had not made a wrong choice in following her mother's lead to England despite everything she had borne witness to in the past. Unlike them, she hopefully had not made a mistake when she fell in love with the man beside her.

"I wanted you out of my room, Robert, not out of my life. I needed time for myself to come to terms with it all," she retorted, trying to stay as calm and nonconfrontational as she possibly could to counteract his mercurial temper.

"And you thought I didn't need that, too?" he asked tonelessly, an unreadable expression on his face.