Unreputable Money

Title: Unreputable Money
Author: ExcentrykeMuse
Fandoms: Downton Abbey / Twilight Saga
Pairings: Bella Swan / Matthew Crawley
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2k
Warning: vampires, gambling, wealth, social status

Unreputable Money

Bella was uncertain how it happened.  She had been separated from Edward as soon as they had been brought down into the bowels of Volterra, and a vampire had brought her into a room where she had been left for hours.  The sun must have set because eventually it had gotten cold and Bella had fallen asleep in a corner, her back pressed up against the wall. 

When she had awakened it had been to see the red eyes of a vampire she had later learned was Lord Marcus. 

“Do you see the lines between her and young Edward?” a clipped voice asked from somewhere in the shadows.

Lord Marcus’s eyes were so red they were almost pink.  His skin was papery thin and nearly white.  Bella thought if she reached out she’d be able to peal it away. 

She kept her hands to herself and convulsively swallowed.

Lord Marcus said nothing.  Instead, he looked away from Bella and walked away, further into the room and into the shadows, and he and the owner of the voice had gone.

Bella fell asleep again sometime later despite the cold.  She woke up to feel someone shaking her.  A vampire, this one looking physically as if he were in his thirties, peered at her with blood stained eyes.

“Are you going to eat me?” Bella whispered, terrified.

“No, little girl,” the vampire told her, taking his hand and laying it atop her head.  His voice was heavy and accented and she had to listen closely to understand him.  “I’m going to send you somewhere far away.”  Then he shoved her head against the wall and she must have lost consciousness.

When Bella woke up, she had a headache and she was no longer in that cold room in Italy.  She was in a room, certainly, but it was different.  For one, it wasn’t made out of stone, but wood.  The windows weren’t boarded up and there were curtains.  She sat up and looked at the palms of her hands which stung. 

The skin was broken where she must have caught her fall, and it seemed she had fallen forward after her head had been slammed against the wall, but she wasn’t bleeding.  She shifted her legs and was surprised to hear the movement of fabric. 

Looking down at her legs, she saw that she was no longer wearing jeans but instead her legs were encased in a long black skirt.  Her fingers skated up her legs and up to her stomach and it felt hard.  She tapped it once and then looked down at her wrists.  She was wearing long silk sleeves.  Quickly getting up, which was difficult in the skirts and in the heeled boots she seemed to be wearing, she went up to a mirror and took in her reflection.

She blinked back at herself.

Bella’s favorite novel was Pride and Prejudice and she was not dressed for Regency England, but she was dressed for, if she was correct given the fact that she seemed to be breathing through a corset (and she was praying it wasn’t whalebone) possible late 19^th, early 20^th century England or America.  Moreover, she seemed to be in mourning given the swaths of black.

She looked down over herself again and felt her breathing pick up.  “Calm,” she told herself as she closed her eyes.  Vampires had gifts.  Lord Marcus had a gift.  Carlisle said he saw relationships.  Lines, the voice had called it.  He was seeing lines when he looked at her, seeing relationships.  And the second vampire, the foreign one, sent her far away—in time, it seemed.  Maybe it had to do with relationships?  Maybe Lord Marcus saw something and she was supposed to be here?  Maybe Edward was here?  Maybe this was Chicago 1918 and Edward was dying of Spanish Influenza?

She opened her eyes and looked around the room.  On a table in the corner were a pair of women’s black gloves and what appeared to be a purse.

Going to the items, she opened the purse and found several hundred pounds in cash, a business card of a hotel in London, and a key.  There unfortunately wasn’t an appointment book.

She swallowed, checked her reflection in the mirror one more time, and then exited the room.

—Bella entered the back room of what appeared to be a pub and a game of poker was being played by four men, an empty seat at the table.

“Are you well, Miss Swan?” one asked, setting down his cards.  “Have you refreshed yourself?”

“Quite,” she agreed, taking in the room quickly and approaching the chair. 

The man beside her took the cigar out of his month, set it down carefully on the table so it wouldn’t smolder, and then came and pulled out her chair for her. 

“Thank you,” she murmured.

The game soon ended, and she was dealt into the next hand. 

One little known fact about Isabella Marie Swan was that she could play anyone in a game of poker.  She paid attention when Charlie played with his friends down at the reservation.  She knew when to bluff, when to raise, and when to fold, and she had the angelic face of a young woman that no man could read.

She made it out of the game with three hundred seventy-five pounds more than when she came into it.  Mr Small offered to call her a carriage, and she had the carriage (with horses) take her to the address on the business card where she had a room waiting for her, which matched the key in her reticule.

The next morning, she had a note in her pigeon hole about another poker game, which she was certain she was going to join (for she was uncertain how else to support herself) and she settled down to breakfast in the hotel dining room.

When she was drinking her morning tea, the maître d’ approached her and asked, “Miss Swan, a soldier from the front lines is staying here and asks to join your table.  We are out of singles and he has a train to catch to Yorkshire in a little over an hour.”

Yes, it didn’t quite seem to be 1918 yet.  Instead, it appeared to be April 1917 and World War I was well under way.

She gave her assent and a place was set across from her, and a handsome young captain sat across from her.

“Good morning,” he greeted, “very kind to let me share your breakfast.”

“It’s the least I can do for our nation’s heroes,” Bella replied in a decidedly American accent.

He smiled at her pleasantly as he took a scone and began to slather it in jam.  “You hail from America, Miss—?”

She nearly choked on her tea but quickly set it down.  “Swan.  Isabella Swan.”  Bella Swan just sounded wrong given the finery of 1917 London.  Bella Swan was a girl from another age, another time.  2008, in point of fact.

“Miss Swan,” he agreed.  “I’m Captain Matthew Crawley.”

“Captain Crawley,” she greeted pleasantly.  “You’re going to Yorkshire?”

“I have a ticket to Yorkshire,” he disagreed, “I haven’t decided if I will go or not.”  He grimaced, which strangely made his visage no less handsome.  “Not sure anyone in Yorkshire wants to see me.”

“Home is always difficult,” Bella decided, thinking that home involved vampires and relationships and lines.  Home is where Charlie was and she didn’t even tell him where she was going.  “London is home now.”  She shrugged.

He smiled at her.  “You find yourself an expatriot.”

“Quite by accident,” she assured him, looking at his bluer than blue eyes.  “It was quite unexpected.”  Bella looked at him a long moment.  He really was nearly attractive, in a human sort of way.  “Where do you fight, Captain?”

“The Western Front,” he paused.  “France, truth be told.”  His voice was careful, his eyes downcast.

She sighed as she thought of her history lessons back in high school.  “Do you have a sweetheart writing you letters?” she asked boldly.

His blue eyes flashed up and took her in.  “No, Miss Swan,” he told her plainly.

“A shame,” she murmured to herself. 

He was looking at her now over his cup of coffee.  “You could write to me, Miss Swan.”

Her mouth dropped open even though her mind had been traveling down a similar pathway.  She set down her cup.  “I am not—particularly—what they call a lady,” she warned.  “You have rank.  You must be from a titled family.”

“What disqualifies you?” he asked her in confusion.  “Surely it is not that you’re an American.  My cousin, the Countess of Grantham, is an American.  American money is quite respectable in England.”

“My money,” she told him carefully, “is not respectable.”  Bella bit her lip, thinking of this society with its rules and how gambling—and a woman gambling, no less—was decidedly not the done thing.

Captain Crawley looked at her quite plainly.  “I don’t care where your money comes from,” he told her decidedly.  “Why are you in mourning, Miss Swan?”

“I lost my father,” she answered truthfully, and Charlie was well and truly lost in a different time and place.

“And your excellent mother?” he asked carefully, his blue eyes taking her in.

“Also gone,” she murmured.  “I’m quite alone here in London.”  Bella gave him a small smile.

He carefully regarded her again.  “Would you do me the honor of walking me to the station, Miss Swan?”

Her mind flitted to Edward, and how he had asked to pick her up and drive her to school.  This was certainly bolder as she did not have a chaperone and this was London a hundred years ago.  “Are you certain you don’t have a sweetheart?” she murmured, her eyes catching his.

“Quite certain,” he told her plainly.  “My heart has been quite free for a great deal of time, Miss Swan.”

Hers had not.  Hers had been claimed by Edward just a few short months ago—and she had flown to Italy to save him.  But she had been sent here for the lines.  Her lines to who exactly?  Was she being set up in the path of one of the gamblers she had met last night, all married men or decided bachelors?  Was she sent to wait and grow older while Edward lived as a human in 1917 Chicago?  Or was she perhaps meant for this breakfast, for this man, with his blue human eyes and his soft smile?

“Then I find,” she decided, “that I would very much care to walk with you.”

The End.