The next Lady Rosamund
I watched the second half of the first episode of Downton Abbey’s final season last night. Where were the men? The Christmas special closing season five had Edith “feeling alive again” in the company of the property agent who will later inherit the title of Marquess of Hexham, and Mary flustered, to the point her hand tremored, by the handsome dark-haired blue-eyed man who drives the fast cars. Season six’s opening episode instead was about establishing how they’re each their own women. The tenant has moved out from Michael Gregson’s flat in London, that Gregson left to Edith, and she has to decide whether to let it again, “Or do I want a place in London? I just don’t know.” Likewise with Gregson’s publishing company, also left to her: does she sell it? does she want to continue running it? “I don’t know, Mama.”
“You have to decide, darling,” her mother Lady Grantham says to her, in the lesson of the episode.
Meanwhile there’s a snarky drawing room moment when Edith, going on again about the flat in London, is quipped by Mary, who says, “Michael Gregson’s flat, you mean.”
“My flat,” Edith says.
Go, Edith!
Edith has been letting herself get walked all over for five seasons. Now it’s finally being made clear that her sister Mary is a widowed mother who inherited Matthew Crawley’s stake in Downton, and also aspires to be Downton’s new property agent in Tom Branson’s place. (Tom is now in Boston.) Edith, on the other hand, also has a child, is something of a widow—an unofficial one, let’s say—and inherited not only her own flat in London (“Right out of the Bloomsbury Set,” Aunt Rosamund says to Edith when they’re looking at it; “It really was,” Edith says, “I met Virginia Woolf right over there. And Lytton Strachey that night as well”) but an entire publishing house.
Oh, poor Edith.
I’ve come to admire her taste in clothes as well. Mary wears stark black or silver dresses; Edith soft golds and pinks that when one looks at the detail are in fact more daring. She’s the next Lady Rosamund.
Mary does in this episode win even more the admiration of her father after he pays off the hotel maid who was blackmailing Mary (since the start of this same episode) about knowing Mary had been at the hotel illicitly with Lord Gillingham.
“He wasn’t good enough, Papa,” Mary says.
“I am more sure than ever that you could run Downton, even the kingdom. I’m leaving it in good hands,” Lord Grantham says.
Mary tears up a bit. She also says in this scene that she’s not sure if she’ll marry again. “Only if it’s someone I truly love. Otherwise I’d rather remain alone.”
“You’re a widow, not a girl just presented [before the King and Queen]. I forget sometimes.”
Mary kindly offers to pay back her father the fifty pounds with which he paid off the maid from the hotel. (The maid had asked for a thousand pounds; Lord Grantham threatened to have her arrested, and gets her to write a confession he can use against her if she ever opens her mouth.)
“Don’t worry about it, darling,” Mary’s father says.
Sex, me, and the daughters of Downton. Sex feels so far from me right now. I can’t even consider the thought of another male body next to me, even less one I truly care for. Season six episode one sets it up that Mary and Edith are both quite happy staying unmarried—so their respective automobile impresario and marquess can arrive later.