A/N: So this came out of a random conversation with a fellow DA fan... a little what-if. A very little what-if.

No one had bothered to ask why a second time, to get more than the simplest answer. Perhaps it was her age, or her terrifying reputation, or merely the fact that when a very old lady demanded something, it was easier to accommodate her rather than ask questions. When she said he should die in a place he knew, they took that to be the final word, the only reason why the Dowager Countess of Grantham would have fought so hard for a young footman named William Mason who had once worked for her son at Downton Abbey.

They might have believed it was because he had saved the life of the heir to the estate, inadvertently causing the end to his own life. It would have been partly true, just as it would have been partly true to believe that she was sentimental about the people of Downton Abbey, the servants who made it the great house it was and always would be. They would, if given time perhaps, suspected the boy was somehow related to her, and this would be the whole truth.

He had a little of the look of his grandmother, she thought as his broken voice whispered the marriage vows, the English blond hair and sweet smile she remembered seeing in church for years. She had been marvelously pretty even in old age, and she had often thought the boy would retain the same gentle good looks.

But he would never be old now.

Her name was Constance, ironic in the extreme considering she was the product of Violet's father-in-law's youthful dalliance with a beautiful housemaid with whom he'd run away to Gretna Green. Joseph and Verity were gone nearly a month before they were discovered in the Scottish shooting cottage of an old family friend. The marriage was annulled by force, yet there was issue, a legitimate child in the face of God and the church made illegitimate by a lie. Verity had died in childbirth, the girl was put with grandparents, and Joseph Crawley's heart was never the same again. The daughter about whose existence he was supposed to lie was lost to him, and he never forgot her mother. He married again, this time to a most proper young lady, who bore him two sons and then only spoke to him at the dinner table, and even less to her boys. She had whipped Edward, her eldest, at age six when he asked why the nursery maid had told him the pretty blonde girl at church was his sister. His father had struck him when he wondered aloud why she didn't live with them. And yet it didn't stop him from wanting to learn everything, and being angry when he learned the truth, and learned it was all a secret. She was his sister, she should have been considered a legitimate child, and yet she didn't know it, and would never know it.

Edward had told Violet this story late into their wedding night, after they had happily discovered that the mutual attraction felt in the months of courtship had manifested itself into a rather thrilling compatibility in the marriage-bed. "What makes you sad?" she had asked him, and he told her about Constance. She had married a village boy and had a child, a daughter. He pointed her out at church when they returned from their honeymoon, and Violet had been struck by the sweetness of the woman, the prettiness of the baby girl, and was utterly entranced by her husband's unconditional, never-to-be-returned brotherly love for a half-sister who did not know him except as the future Earl of Grantham. He could only show that love by ensuring her husband always had work and there was always firewood. When the pretty baby grew up into an equally pretty young woman and married a nice man named Mason, Violet knew the Earl did the same for Mason.

When her darling was dying, she promised him without prompting she would keep an eye on Constance's family. She did her best, but in the end she could not save Constance's grandson. She could only give him the best kind of death possible in those horrible circumstances, and she felt without question that she owed that to Constance, a woman to whom she had never spoken, because she believed Edward's love for the sister who did not know him was the reason he was so kind and so loving to her, and the only way Violet could repay her was by guaranteeing her grandchild William would go to his death knowing only kindness and love.

FIN