Free This Cold Country by Annabel Davis-Goff

press-ganged from the village. And Aunt Glad traveled with a maid who had done the flowers. Lady Nugent managed, not unkindly, to suggest to Daisy that the most helpful thing she could do would be to relieve her hostess of the responsibility of entertaining her. Daisy said she would love to take a long walk. “If you really want to make yourself useful, you could take the dogs for a walk,” Lady Nugent said, her manner that of one ticking off two small items at the bottom of a very long list.
    Daisy, wearing sensible shoes, set out with an overweight spaniel and an elderly Labrador. Since the dogs were both lazy and well trained, she stopped worrying about losing them by the time she reached the end of the avenue. Setting out along an unpaved road in the opposite direction to the one she had traveled the night before, Daisy followed the outer wall of the Nugent estate. Ivy-covered in parts, with glimpses of the woods showing through the broken-down bits, Daisy thought it beautiful. She also thought it a pity that James—the James who had met her at the station—was not with her. She wondered if she had, by rejecting him the night before, lost someone of great value, the only person with whom she had so far felt a complete sense of intimacy. Or had she merely been fooled by the charm of a practiced seducer, a practiced seducer who now couldn’t be bothered to go through even the motions of good manners?
    Lunch, while neither festive nor delicious, was not as silent as breakfast had been. The Nugents talked amongst themselves, largely about arrangements and guests for that evening. Aunt Glad had a few details she wanted to clear up with Daisy and asked how she was traveling back to Wales. Daisy told her, mentioning the time her train departed; she had, for the first time, the attention of every person present. Patrick and Kate, at the far end of the table, talked quietly. Daisy could not hear what they were saying. James did not appear.
    During lunch, it started to rain. Afterward they drank weak coffee from small cups in the library. Patrick, and then Lizzie, left the room; Daisy, now desperate, asked Lady Nugent for some task. Either in response to Daisy’s urgency or because she had just remembered that her necklace was wired onto a frame, Lady Nugent asked Daisy to unpick it carefully and had given her a small pair of sharp nail scissors with which to perform the operation.
    The necklace had been professionally mounted. Sitting under a good light, Daisy had carefully edged the tip of the scissors under the thread that, tightly wound several times, held each strand in place. The thread was coarse and strong and had a stiff, wirelike quality. Daisy suspected she was causing irreparable harm to the scissors but wished neither to interrupt her hostess at her tasks, whatever they might be, nor to appear to question her judgment. She knew only that her own mother would have had a fit if Daisy had ever treated
her
nail scissors like that.
    As Daisy cut the mounting away, the necklace grew pliant in her lap and a sprinkling of snippets of thread lay at her feet. She wondered where the necklace had been kept since the coronation. She didn’t imagine there was a safe in Bannock House, and it seemed unlikely that an object so old and so valuable would just have been stuffed in a cupboard. It had probably been kept at the bank; but would the local bank—presumably small and modest—have a procedure for storing jewelry, or would they make an exception for the Nugents? Daisy was considering the probabilities and details of the arrangement when she snipped the last thread. Then she stood in front of the looking glass to see what diamonds would look like. Then Patrick had come in.
    Becoming gradually warm under the slippery eiderdown, Daisy now remembered that she had not picked up the small, stiff fragments of thread she had let drop onto the carpet. She felt irritated at herself, but did not consider