Daisychain Summer
The Sequel toI’ll Bring you Buttercups.WITH PAIN COMES JOYThe legacy of the Great War has haunted and changed the lives of both Upstairs and Downstairs society. For spirited and resourceful Alice Hawthorne, ex-sewing-maid, ex-Lady Sutton and now happily married to gamekeeper Tom Dwerryhouse, fortune shines on that union and brings forth an adorable daughter, Daisy. But will the complex life of her mother affect Daisy's future?WHEN OLD WAYS GIVE WAY TO NEWBrilliantined bounder Elliot Sutton has been ordered to mend his wayward ways by his dominant mother, Clementina. Will marriage to Anna Petrovska, the beautiful Russian aristocrat, produce a much needed Pendenys heir? And will dignified and genteel Julia Sutton pick up the pieces of her shattered life?THE FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURENow there's a new generation of Suttons who must look life in the eye. Will the sins of one generation be visited upon by the next?
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ELIZABETH ELGIN
Daisychain Summer
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
Copyright © Elizabeth Elgin 1995
Elizabeth Elgin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006478874
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780008271190
Version: 2018-11-12
Contents
1920
She should have told him long before this. When she held their firstborn in her arms she had said it would be, yet that baby was four weeks old now, and still he did not know. Nor had he asked. It was as if he had pushed that part of her life behind him; locked it in a small, secret corner of his mind, never to be spoken of again.
‘Whatever it was,’ Tom had said, ‘is in the past. It’s you I want, Alice. Just you.’ And in that moment she had known that one day she would tell him the truth of it, explain how it had been so he might understand – and forgive.
‘Very well, if you choose not to know. But since you are taking me on trust, I’ll make you a promise, Tom. The day I hold our firstborn in my arms, then you shall know – every last word of it …’
Yet was this really the right day on which to tell him? Why not yesterday, or tomorrow? Why today, the first anniversary of their wedding?
She dropped to her knees beside the cot. She spent so much time just gazing at her daughter, trying to believe the wonder of her birth, the ease of it and the joy. And Tom, eyes moist, holding her close, telling her how happy he was.
‘She’s so beautiful, so perfect.’ The tiny fingers had twined around his own and claimed his heart. ‘I thought newborn bairns were – well …’
‘Ordinary?’ she smiled. ‘They are. Every one of them. Pink and puckered, or looking as if they’ve been in a fist fight. But there’s one exception – your own. They are always born beautiful, and perfect.’
‘I love you,’ he’d said, huskily, and she knew that when the midwife came to shoo him from the room he would go to his hut, and weep. Tom was like that. Hard on the outside and given to sudden anger, yet soft and gentle inside.
‘And might a man be told his daughter’s name?’ Alice should choose, he’d always said, if they had a little lass.
‘Daisy Julia Dwerryhouse,’ she announced promptly.
‘Daisy Dwerryhouse.’ He liked the name, truth known. ‘And Julia for –?’
‘For my best friend – her godmother.’
‘You’ve asked her?’
‘No, but she’ll come. She didn’t get to our wedding. I want her here, for the christening.’
That had been when the midwife bustled in, bearing a cup of sweetened gruel, announcing that the new mother needed to sleep and that he could come up, later, and see them again.
Alice lifted the sleeping child, kissing her as she laid her in her pram, raising the hood against the bright August sunlight. She had wanted to buy the magnificent perambulator long before Daisy was born, but no! she had been told. Didn’t she know it was bad luck to have the pram in the house before the babe – the first babe, that was?
So Alice had chosen a model in shiny black, with large wheels and the body suspended on leather straps and paid a deposit on it, explaining that it wasn’t convenient, yet, to have it delivered, and so flushed with excitement had she been that the awfulness of it only struck her on the way home.
Five guineas, the pram would cost, to be paid for with her own money; her private money Tom didn’t know about – money Giles had given to her. Sir Giles Sutton, Julia’s brother, who died not of war wounds, but because of them; a stretcher bearer and the bravest of the brave. Giles, whose name reminded her that today she must tell Tom what she should have told him before they were married, yet had bitten back the words because she hadn’t wanted her secret to lie between them on their wedding night.
