adifferentlife | A tour of sorts [[Combeferre]]

Combeferre hurried up the block towards the cafe where Mademoiselle Crawley (he couldn't think of her as anything else, not quite yet) had suggested they meet. Her offer to show him around had been so kind, he had overcome his natural shyness - not to mention skepticism of those funny little telephones - to contact her, as she had suggested, and he had found himself rather looking forward to it for most of a day. She seemed a kind girl (and lovely, too, to be perfectly honest) and a warm host, and besides, the opportunity to speak French and see the hospital facilities was difficult to pass up.

As was so often the case, he had a couple of books under his arm: Candide, a perennial favorite of his that he had picked up in a bookshop out of nostalgia for his own collection in Paris, and a biography of Albert Einstein he had found at the public library that had become his second home. He smiled crookedly as he approached and set his books beside the vacant chair. "Bonjour, Mademoiselle," Combeferre greeted her as he sat. "I hope you have not been waiting long?"

"Bonjour, Monsieur." The books are of interest to her, but she tells herself to not look and instead to focus on Henri. It's only difficult for the briefest of seconds, her smile genuine as she looks to the man across from her. "Not long. I thought I might get in a bit of study but it's such a beautiful day my mind has wandered."

"Ah, you must be careful. Beautiful days are dangerous in that regard." He grinned briefly and brightly. "What are you studying, if you do not mind me asking?"

"The most dangerous. Soon enough it will be too cold to sit outside." Her tea is nearly done, so she leaves the cup, closing her notebook before sliding it into the canvas bag she carries up to class. "I want to revel in it, but there is school, work, so many things. Still, it is nice to have these moments, between whatever else that might happen."

"Integrated nursing, which includes pharmacology. Three units of it and then clinical practice." She doesn't mind telling him, she loves talking about her courses and what she's learning. "It's hard work, I feel like I spent most of last year catching up to what everyone else knew just to begin. But I love it, and I wouldn't change it."

"You keep busy," Combeferre observed, admiration in his voice, and a sort of gentle surprise. Not many people would take so much on, and with such obvious determination and vigor. He grimaced with sympathy as she described her coursework, knowing he would need to take a similar path - an invigorating path, but a daunting one as well.

A waitress stopped by the table and asked if they needed anything; Combeferre ordered coffee, though, not for the first time, he had to try two or three times to explain that, no, he did not wish for a latte, or americano, or venti mocha soy chai something-or-other. He chuckled a little as the woman left and shook his head. "Is it at all like your education at home, what you have been doing here?"

"I don't think I could ever go back to an idle life. It's busy to study and work, but I can't imagine it without." She asks for water and another tea, if only because there isn't enough nice tea in this town. What Sybil doesn't want to say is that it fills her time and keeps her loneliness away. That not having her sisters and family here is sometimes a deeper wound than she cares to admit. "Before- I was only allowed to be a nurse because there was a war. It wouldn't have been considered proper for a lady to work, my days were filled mostly with, well, nothing. I didn't realise how empty my days they were until I started at nursing school. What we learned, it was what we needed. How to clean and dress the wounds, how to care for the soldiers. This is so very different."

A lady? Combeferre was polite enough not to comment upon this revelation, but surely his surprise showed on his face for a moment. This clever, pretty, practical girl did not fit any of the images, half-sympathetic or otherwise, that he had of aristocracy.

"There is a power in work," he agreed thoughtfully instead. "And usefulness can make the days sweeter. I confess, I have so much idle time at the moment, I barely know what to do with myself. 'tis unsettling." And even when he did begin his study again, his days would stretch ahead strangely empty with no secret meetings, no clandestine munitions runs, no staying up to wee hours, bent over tables in rooms filled with candle smoke, drafting words that might change the world. "This was the war they called the First World War, oui?" He had done some reading, enough to discover that not all the future was bright, and not all progress was ushered forward for the good.

She sees the look, but if he doesn't say anything about it, neither will she. It's not something she mentions often, mostly because she's seen how it changes how people treat her. Sybil is more than the youngest daughter of the earl of Downton, she has always been.

"It does, and you will find something that you enjoy again. Perhaps study and the hospital might even suit you as well." She's earnest in her words, her belief in what she says obvious, even as her good cheer fades as she thinks to history that was in fact her future. "We called it the Great War. It's terrible to think there was another. The things that I saw, and I was only at a hospital in England. It was all so senseless."

"Oh, yes, of course. I expect so. The truth of the matter is, I am easily pleased. I should not complain." He smiled through this half-truth. Combeferre was not precisely lying, for his study surely would fill his time once it began, and until then, the public library would keep him occupied. But that hole in his heart where his friends and his cause had once been, that would not be filled by busy hours.

As the topic shifted to the war, his expression grew serious. His coffee came, and he softly thanked the waitress as he wrapped his hands around the ceramic mug. "I had read something about it," he told her quietly. But he had to wonder how well books stood up to the real thing. He had read of such senseless bloodshed, such overwhelming destruction that he half- disbelieved it, and half feared that the reality had been even worse.

Combeferre shook his head a little. "But forgive me - I do not mean to dwell on such a weighty topic on such a lovely day." A beat. "And when in such good company." He might have said such pretty company, had he been a bolder man.

She peeks over to the chair that he's set his books on, shaking her head. "Einstein? Reading of science and history that is truly the future? I think that you are extremely curious and inquisitive."

"But it can still be hard. Being here, learning what we do and how the world doesn't learn the lessons of the past." She lifts a shoulder in a shrug, knowing that there are things she'd much rather speak of. Pouring her tea, she smiles again at his compliment, not hiding her pleasure at his words. It's a nice thing to sit and talk with something, it's something she's been missing. "Well, then we should have our drinks and enjoy the day. I have promised to how the hospital, haven't I?"

Combeferre's laugh was self-deprecating. "I enjoy reading," he said with a shrug. "And understanding a bit about how the world works helps me better find my place in it. I like to think this Einstein would appreciate that sentiment, actually."

"You did indeed promise me a tour," he said with a nod, allowing Sybil to carry their conversation towards more cheerful waters. "What is the hospital like?" Even with all the bits and pieces he had heard - phrases like emergency room and outpatient surgery and resident, he found he had too little understanding of medicine in this age to truly picture what went on within its massive walls. And yet he had spent the last seven years - a significant portion of his lifetime - studying in facilities that purported to have the same purpose.

"My father had a wonderful library, but it was nothing like the libraries here. I love those, and spent most of my first few weeks at one of the tables in there piled high wither everything I could grab." Sybil recounts the story happily, remembering those days with the fondness that comes with distance. At the time she had been stressed and worried and out of sorts, trying to find something familiar to cleave to. "I still go too often. I love novels, actually, some of the most dreadful things sometimes."

She sips the tea, the hint of bergamot and lavender mixed with milk a comfort she can't deny. "It's large, and clean." She laughs at her own words, knowing how vague and non-descriptive they are. "Everything is metal and shining. It's silly to say but so clean. It's also distant, in many ways. Health is a business as much as anything else. They can heal many things, but some still confound."

Combeferre grinned in recognition. "That sounds very much like my days since I have gotten here," he said. "The sheer variety alone - history, and politics, and literature, going back a hundred years or more. I saw some titles that were popular in my own time. The libraries of La Sorbonne were magnificent, of course, but these are open to everyone. Remarkable, n'est pas?" He ducked his head sheepishly, realizing how he had gone on.

'Large and clean' might have been vague, but the image those words brought to mind was decidedly foreign. Combeferre shook his head with wonder. "Nothing like the hospitals I know, then," he observed wryly. "How do they keep it so clean?" The question was half rhetorical. "I have read something about those advances. Antibiotics. Vaccines. Diseases annihilated in one fell swoop."

"There's more than I could ever have imagined. A friend got me a record player not long after I came here as well." Sybil smiles encouragingly, knowing just how it feels. She's had that look often enough herself. "There were composers and singers and so much to listen to. We had one ourselves back in my own home, but the recordings are of such high quality it amazed me."

"Yes, but they haven't been entirely a blessing. Some have created diseases that are resistant to the very drugs created to treat them. But they are more of a gift than not." Sybil thinks the last very firmly, having seen gangrene and other infections and their toll on so many. "I would trade near anything to be able to take penicillin home with me. To help those wounded in the war."

Combeferre nodded, once again appreciating her steady practicality. "Few things are are entirely positive when in excess," he agreed. "And treating the sick requires balance. Galen seems to have gotten that right, if he was wrong about nearly everything else." Despite his words, the young would-be doctor could only feint at such cautious wisdom. The sights and smells of epidemic were still too recent in his memories to, in his heart, think sensibly about modern medicine's miracle cures. "Cholera was particularly bad in Paris this spring - right before I got here, that is," he said with a sobered expression. "To think, we could have so easily combated it, if we had only known how."

"I'm sorry to hear that," she says seriously, knowing how devastating diseases could be. It was a fact of life for them, and she can only imagine it would have been worse near on a hundred years before. "It was one of the things we worried about the most with the soldiers and the war. What if they brought disease? I suppose we were right because I read a few years later there was a horrible epidemic."

Combeferre winced. "Tragedy on top of tragedy," he murmured. "And yet, I find myself surprised by how pessimistic so many here seem to be, despite their advantages. I know well that nothing is perfect, but..." he trailed off with a frown. "For example, I recently spoke to a man, another outsider here, but one whose home better aligns with this place, who claimed to be suspicious of the many services Darrow offers free of charge. And while I grant such privileges are miraculous and even baffling, but does no one in the modern world dream of a better future, or look back on all that has been accomplished already? I never thought I would see the day that medical care was provided to all without cost, but even two hundred years ago, I knew that it would happen." He shrugged sheepishly. "Am I making any sense?"

"Yes," she responds, perhaps far too eagerly. Sybil cannot help that his words excite her, there are too few here that are from a time as far behind them as her own, and it is a perspective that cannot be easily explained away for all that she has indeed tried. "The myriad of privileges that we all have in this place stuns me, and yet it seems all people want some of the time is more of it. I know the girls I go to school with-"

She stops herself, shaking her head at what she had been about to say. Instead she chooses different words, more careful ones, leaning back in her seat. "I would happily have given up all that we had at Downton should we be able to live like this, all of us."

But her eagerness only brought a warm smile to Combeferre's lips. He tipped his head to the side. "What about the girls you go to school with?" Though he was teasing, he was also genuinely curious.

She looks quickly to the side before leaning forward over the table. It isn't something to be shouted, mostly because it's not the most charitable of thoughts. "They worry so much about which boy talked to them at the clubs, or how intoxicated they became the night before. Some barely scrape by in the classes and they detest all of the work we must do out of class. But to have this opportunity for an education, and to be able to help others when we are done? Isn't that a gift of sorts?"

Well then, Combeferre thought, having to suppress a smile, men and women have even more in common than I imagined. "It is a gift," he agreed. "Though I fear those privileged with such opportunities, once they had come to expect them, rarely appreciate them to the degree they should. 'tis the price of progress, I fear."

"I suppose that it is. It isn't like I ever offered to eschew my old life, even if I did take up work." Then, only when war prompted her. "Perhaps we do take it all for granted, but I'd rather not believe that."

Sybil won't believe that at any rate. There's too much hope in her to allow herself to think that people can't all strive to be better, or that some few could make a difference. "I remember how exciting it was to see the votes read after an election. Even if I did end up with a rather large bump on my head."

"Why, mademoiselle, next you will be telling me that you regularly attended political rallies," Combeferre grinned. Ever since arriving in Darrow, he had not been able to shake a tight knot of anxiety in his chest, but now, here, it loosened. "That must have been quite the thing to see. I imagine ladies like yourself were not the average spectator?" He had no judgment in his voice; if anything, there was admiration.

"We weren't. I was in rather a bit of trouble that I went at all." Sybil can't contain the sense of happiness she feels at his response, exhibiting itself in a rather large and unprepossessing smile. Even Branson had been frustrated by her decision to attend that day, and her father and sisters had not understood at all. To have someone not react in that way (and also not to seem uncaring as if there were no significance to her actions at all) was a pleasant surprise she found herself unprepared for. "I had only been to one before that, but I tried to get to suffrage meetings in London. Sadly, no one would let me out of their sight by then."

It's a frustration she had lived with, just, instead dragging her sister to all the charity functions she could manage. It was, after all, her season. "The energy amazed me. To think if we applied it the things we could all change. Perhaps we might have a world like this one."

In all honesty, Combeferre might have reacted differently, had they been in Paris, or even England, and a young woman like the one sitting across from him had wanted to take part in a political even that might have turned dangerous. But here there was enough distance to soften such instinctual concerns, and he was left merely admiring her courage and determination. Combeferre had long insisted that women, given the smallest opportunity and education, would surely leap at the chance to have their voices heard, and provide perspective that men never could. The women who populated Darrow wore trousers, and too any number of jobs, and even held political office, and that was a wonder. But Sybil, who had lived somewhere between his own time and current one, and who had been handed scraps of rights and insisted on using them to the fullest extent while fighting for more, she was something to see.

It was breathtaking. She was… rather breathtaking.

"I like to think that is what happened," Combeferre said thoughtfully. "My understanding is that Darrow resembles our future, more or less. I think it's fair to say that the energy you saw that day did not go to waste. The People demanded what should rightfully be theirs - health, and well-being, and freedom, and self-determination - and they got it. As we always do, eventually."

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