As Christmas 1926 approaches, the Forbes family are preparing to host a celebration at Eden Hall. Eighteen-year-old Daisy is preoccupied by a sense of change in the air. Overnight, her relationship with Stephen Jessop, the housekeeper’s son, has shifted and every encounter seems fraught with tension. Before the festivities are over, Daisy has received a declaration of love, a proposal and a kiss – from three different men. Unable to bear the confusion she flees to London and stays with her elder sister.
By the following summer, Daisy has bowed to the persistence of the man who proposed to her the previous year. When the family reunite for a party at Eden Hall and Stephen is once more in her life, it is clear to Daisy she is committing to the wrong person. Yet she also believes that family secrets mean she has no choice but to follow her head instead of her heart. Will love conquer all, or is Daisy’s fate already written?
The book is out right now and the cover is stunning, here's an extract from Chapter one to whet your appetite:Long before Fletch, during the war, Stephen had attended lessons in the schoolroom with Daisy and a few other local children. And he had been included in every birthday party, each nursery tea: teas with the ruddy-faced, tartan-clad cousins from Scotland, and teas with the silent children recently moved to the area whom Daisy’s mother had taken a shine to. ‘New friends!’ Mabel would say, clapping her hands together. Those had been the worst teas: tense affairs with spilled drinks and red faces and curious, resentful stares.
And then there were the pea-flicking, bread-throwing children from London.
They weren’t all orphans, Stephen had explained; some of them had parents, but they were too poor to look after them. These children had continued to come each summer during the war, and for a few years after it, sleeping in the night nursery—turned into a dormitory—at the top of the house, a different group each year. They were anything but silent. They came through windows rather than use doors and slid down the banisters rather than use the stairs. They loved fighting and swearing and climbing—walls, trees, drainpipes and the greenhouse roof, until two of them fell through. They all had nits, and rivulets of green running from their noses to their mouths, wiped onto their sleeves. Almost all of them smoked, and they liked to start fires and give people frights, and they were always hungry. ‘Bleedin’ starvin’,’ they said, each day, at every time of day.
Everyone’s nerves were frayed to tatters by the time they left. But Stephen had been the go-between, able to understand them as well as he did Daisy and her sisters.
Even now, Daisy often thought of Janet Greenwell, whose head had been shaved and whose sad little legs were paler and thinner than any Daisy had ever seen. And she remembered the crippled boy, Neville, a caliper on his leg and such thick lenses in his spectacles that they made his eyes appear small. ‘Crippled Chinky,’ the others had called him, shouted after him as he limped off up the brick pathway of the walled garden.
Only once had Daisy summoned the courage to confront them, only once had she shouted back at them that they were cruel bullies and then gone after Neville, whom she’d found slumped next to the rabbit hutch, his stiff leg stretched out in front of him, like a war veteran—but without any medals for bravery.
‘They don’t mean to be vile; they’re just ignorant,’ she’d said, sitting down next to him on the grass, longing to wrap her arms round him. He’d not said anything, had quietly wept, wiping his nose on his gray shirtsleeve, staring through his thick spectacles at his useless leg.
The day before Neville left, Daisy gave him the book she had won at the flower show for her vegetable animal (a horse, made from potato, carrots and peas, with ribbons of cucumber peel for its mane and tail, had earned her second prize and a ‘highly commended’ badge from the judges). She had thought long and hard about which book to give him but plumped for A Shropshire Lad mainly because of that word, lad. Inside, she wrote, ‘Dear Neville, I hope I’ll see you again and that you’ll come back here one day without the others. Yours, Daisy M. Forbes.’ When she told Stephen, he’d shaken her hand and told her that she was the kindest person he knew.
Always, after these children had gone, Eden Hall returned to its usual quiet and calm. It was a place of order and routine and of bells—to announce breakfast or lessons or lunch; the dressing bell, the dinner bell, each day had been punctuated by that sound. Months, seasons and years had passed and the bell still sounded. For Daisy, little had changed. But the thought of Eden Hall without Stephen, the idea of his not being there, of never seeing him again…
No, Stephen couldn’t emigrate, Daisy thought, watching him walk on ahead of her, pulling back gorse and holly and brambles as they made their way through thickets and knee-high heather. She would speak to her father, she decided; wait until he was home for Christmas, find the right time and speak to him about all of this then. After all, he’d been the one to sort the legalities of Stephen’s adoption, and he might even be able to offer Stephen a job at the factory… Either way, she concluded, her father would know what to do. He always did.
I'm so looking forward to delving into this book myself and will share my review with you when I do.
Many thanks to Canelo for inviting me to take part in the blog tour, please take the time to check out the other stops as the tour continues until 8th October!
