12. Somebody Else

Every heavy tale has a useful fool. Yorick. Luna Lovegood. Mario Incandenza. The White Knight. On the BBC series Downton Abbey, George V is king, and the Earl and Countess of Grantham live in an enormous house with their three daughters and untold numbers of servants. One of them, a small kitchen maid, is named Daisy. Her skin's wan and her voice is all pip and squeak. Once, Daisy watches the cook push a planchette over a spirit board and believes a ghost was talking to her. Once, she lies about seeing a valet steal some winebottles. She falls in love with a footman, who, it's clear to everybody but her, is gay—"Not a ladies man," in the words of the cook—and, later, she marries a dying soldier because everybody tells her to. Then this man dies. "I feel nothing," Daisy tells Ms. Patmore. She wakes at 4:30 every morning and creeps round the family’s bedrooms, lighting fires. Seventeen hours later she's washed crockery for the fourth time that day and is sent to bed, like a child, while the grownups gossip in the servants' hall. Among every domestic who abides her lot at Downton, Daisy is the lowest. Rankless. Impulsive. She's a dunce and a ditz. Everybody loves her.