It seems that the various story lines are separating, each one going its own narrow way.  Could the rich tapestry of interwoven strands of plot be unraveling?

Mrs. Carson – Mrs. Hughes as was – got the wedding service she wanted where she wanted it, and she got a long way toward having the reception she wanted, too.  Mr. Carson was able to fit in a lovely speech, hitting just the right tone, and we were on the verge of tucking into an old-fashioned, although unfashionable, wedding breakfast, when who should show up but Tom Branson and little Sybbie.  It was thoughtless to turn up at that precise moment.  Had they appeared prior to the wedding service, no one could have complained.  After the reception would have been even better.  Right in the middle of the celebration seemed the wrong time for a reunion.

But then, Mr. and Mrs. Carson have to recognize that the light that shines upon them is reflected by the Crawley family, wherever that reflected light happens to fall, whether at Downton or at the local school makes no difference.  If the event had been held at Downton, would the Carsons have been expected to see to it that Mr. and Miss Branson were properly settled before seeing to their own wedding breakfasts?  Mr. Carson, at least, would have been pulled in that direction even if no one else suggested it.  Mrs. Carson’s wisdom in insisting on a service and reception ex Downton is confirmed.

By following Thomas Barrow on his hunt for new employment, we are getting a close-up view of the state of the Yorkshire market for stately homes in 1925.  Prior to the beginning of Thomas’s search, we saw a house that had been sold under duress.  Last week we saw a down-at-heels house where Mr. Barrow would have been asked to serve as footman, chauffeur, and valet.  This week, we visit a once great establishment now on the edge of ruin, its owner on the edge of insanity.  How many more such houses are in the neighborhood?

Where does this leave someone like Mr. Barrow?  He is clever enough to have maneuvered himself to a respectable position as a senior domestic servant in a stately home.  He might have achieved equal or greater success had he taken a different path in life.  He has demonstrated high-order social skills, even if they are often in the service of bad motives.  During the war, he used guile and an ability to ingratiate himself to move from the death sentence of the Western Front’s trenches to hospital service in Yorkshire.  Last season, it required a deep understanding of social relationships for him to devise and implement a plot that resulted in the arrival of Lord Sinderbey’s lady friend, child in hand, at the doorstep of Lord S.’s Yorkshire home.

Had he worked as a politician, an investment manager, a barrister, what might he not have achieved?  The English class system denied him those careers and he took what he judged to be the best available option in the “fat years of plenty” that preceded the First World War.  Now things have gotten leaner.  Several proprietors of great houses in the story have complained that wages had gone up so fast since the war that they can no longer afford to keep the required number of staff.

Why did this happen?  Part of the reason had to be the result of the World War.  About 750,000 British soldiers and sailors died in the war.  That figure does not include the Commonwealth or Empire.  Another two million were permanently disabled.  The British population at the start of the war was roughly 45 million.  If half of those were men, and the great majority of casualties were also men, the male workforce was reduced by perhaps 20% after we account for those too young and too old to work.  I have not tried to research this, but I would reckon that the last time anything like this happened in Britain was the time of the Black Death in the fourteenth century.  A reduction in the number of available workers naturally increases the value of the labor of those who are left.

Add to that dynamic the continued industrialization of the economy.  Mechanization renders labor more productive and therefore more valuable.  Throw in a good measure of the inflation that was used to finance the war, and the price of an hour of labor whether employed in a factory or in setting out a tea service at Downton Abbey was bound to go up.  The income available to landed families was less likely to rise than were their costs.

But where does that leave someone like Thomas?  Tea services, wine cellars, silver platters and all the rest are what he knows.  They are the tools of his trade, but the market that could afford to be served in that way was shrinking in 1925 and would be under severe stress within the span of his working life.  It must have been a horrible situation for people who, it turned out, had painted themselves into a corner without realizing they were doing it.  Eventually, film stars, industrialists, and American millionaires would take over some of the great houses, but I wonder if they maintained staff at the levels that a family like the Crawleys would have required in the years of our story.

It’s nice to see that some of the Downton characters are on the road to happiness.  Edith and the “Agent” – didn’t catch his name – happened to meet as she was heading to the office.  Was it a meeting by chance, or was he waiting for her, having tracked down her address ahead of time?  I was sure they were going to hit it off when he smiled at her last season.  I remember thinking at the time that it would help him to woo Edith if he had a useful skill.  He would need to be able to get beyond shooting birds or sharking cards.

It turns out that he has the most useful skill a publisher could ask for when she has just sacked her editor.  He can help put together a late edition of a magazine.  When Edith, the Agent, and her assistant finished, I thought of the last scene in Casablanca – the start of a beautiful friendship, minus the Marseillaise and the bottle of Vichy water.

Mary did not like it at all when Robert praised Edith for her work in the publishing business.  Mary does not like people who work for a living.  She turned up her nose at Matthew when he was a working solicitor, although she put her snobbery aside in his case, eventually.  Nor is she happy to see Edith being praised for anything.  Put the two together and I won’t be surprised to see Mary do something unpleasant in the closing episodes.  However, if the wealthy bird-shooting fellow comes by, Mary may shelve her plans for Edith.  I think Edith has been through enough and it would be nice to see her story reach its close without further incident.

I confess that my attention has wandered some during the three episodes of Season Six that we have seen so far.  There were two details during the meeting between Edith and the Agent that have nothing to do with the story, but which drew my attention.  One is that in the distance, there was an “Underground” sign.  I understand that Holborn is the Tube station that serves Bloomsbury, but which Underground station are we seeing in the distance, and is the sign authentic to the period?  Also, the white building behind Edith and the Agent had the legend “T N.G.C. 1818” (with the T, minus the full stop, appearing above the other three letters) embossed on either side of the archway that is lined up with the Underground sign in the distance.  At the top of the arch, a smaller emblem shows T CTS 1848.  Again, the T appears above the other three letters.  I wonder what they stood for.  If anyone reading this happens to know, I would be grateful for the information.

I hope we will be able to add Mr. and Mrs. Bates and the good Mr. Mason to our list of characters whose fortunes might be looking up.  Anna appears to be pregnant and she is a train ride away from the London doctor who can keep her that way.  (That didn’t come out right.)  Mr. Mason would be the perfect tenant for the recently vacated Drew farm.  He can tend to the pigs and he can take up the slack in dispensing folk wisdom that will result from Mr. Drew’s relocation.  However, for some reason, Cora is reluctant to announce that this is her plan.  Possibly, Daisy has allowed her hopes and those of Mr. Mason to rise too high.

Cora has demonstrated that she can be rough with the servants when her normally placid emotional state is disturbed.  She almost put a cloud over the Hughes-Carson wedding when she struck out at the Hughes-Patmore-Bates triumvirate.  In her defense, she was entering her own room to relax after an unbelievably brutal day of travel and meetings – the strain would have been something the servants can hardly appreciate – and she did not expect to see three senior members of her staff going through her clothes.  And we can now put aside any thought that Mary was beginning to think of other people’s feelings in her daily dealings.  She could so easily have warned Cora about the distribution of Cora’s clothing that Mary had authorized.  But that would have required her to get out of her chair right in the middle of tea.

Naturally, Cora’s better nature emerges eventually and she goes the extra step of descending below stairs to offer a sincere apology to Hughes and Patmore.  (I don’t think Anna was in that scene.)  So, everything was all right finally, but how unfortunate that the three loyal servants had to be put through such distress on the day before the wedding.

We are learning that Mr. Spratt and Miss Denker each has hidden depths of guile.  Sergeant Willis pays a call to the back door of Violet’s house to question Mr. Spratt about his missing good-for-nothing nephew.  I would have thought that even in 1925 the “Constable’s Guide to Effective Interrogation” would have directed Sergeant Willis to question Spratt and Denker separately.  However, it saves the Sergeant’s valuable time if he questions them both together.  Besides, if he questions them separately, one of them will have to get out of his or her chair and go to a different room, something that everyone in Yorkshire, whether born high or low, seems reluctant to do.

The result is that Denker now knows Mr. Spratt’s tale and has something to hold over him.  Spratt, meanwhile, has kept the P.G. Wodehouse connection warm by hiding someone in the potting shed.  Where this will all lead is a question.  Mr. Spratt is hardly a master criminal, and if Denker stoops to blackmail, her objective will be some minor household privilege and not the thousand pounds that Miss Bevan sought from Mary in Episode 1.  I don’t think there is enough time left in this season for this particular story line to develop or to have much impact.  Let’s hope that Mr. Spratt’s nephew doesn’t commit some foul crime in the meantime.

Am I the only viewer who has had it with Isobel’s hectoring tone and moral certainty?  Among the admirable qualities of the English we must include reserve, tact, and the liberal use of irony and understatement.  Isobel seems to lack each and every one of these.  To her credit, she also lacks some of the vices of the English of that day, including class snobbery and mindless adherence to tradition.  Her attack on Dr. Clarkson struck me as un-English.  She attacked him directly and openly, in a scolding temper, on a question of his personal character, and she did so in a public setting.  It was, or ought to have been, humiliating to him and embarrassing to the rest of the company.  She does eventually apologize, but an insult made in public is never quite erased by an apology given in private.

It’s annoying that her ill manners worked to her advantage this time.  For one thing, Dr. Clarkson is a man of integrity and eventually realized that Isobel’s criticism of him was fair, although put to him in a manner that would have stiffened the back of a less reasonable man.  For another, Isobel is on the right side of the hospital question.  These hectoring people who adopt attitudes of moral superiority are occasionally right, like an out-of-date calendar, and the rest of us just have to put up with it.

One other story thread that may be pointing to a happy outcome is the tale of Mr. Molesley’s missed educational opportunities.  The master at the local school is impressed with Mr. Molesley’s efforts to lead Daisy into the groves of Academe.  Molesley is a man who can distinguish at a glance between the War of the Austrian, and that of the Spanish, Succession.  He might lack the proper credentials, but perhaps a way can be found to move him from footman to his proper role in life.

Finally, to come back to the Hughes-Carson wedding for a moment, I was glad to hear the sound of bagpipes as the service ended.  A bagpipe in the hands of a skilled piper can combine celebration, ceremony, and solemnity as can no other instrument.

I wonder if the short road ahead will run as straight as seems possible at the moment.  We shall see.