HartsLove by K.M. Grant Page A

strength, then helped him back across the drawbridge. ‘Garth’s safe,’ she told the others. ‘We’ve seen him.’
    â€˜Lord Love Us.’ Mrs Snipper was still wringing her hands. Lily had fainted.
    â€˜I don’t think the Lord had much to do with it,’ Daisy said. ‘Help Rose with Lily, Mrs Snips. I can manage Pa.’
    Daisy left her father in the library and returned to the drawing room. It was impossible to believe that scarcely half an hour had passed since the intruders had arrived. The cheque was still lying on the floor. Daisy burned it whilst the others laid Lily on a sofa and sprinkled her with water. When Lily began to come round, Rose wiped her hands and tried to be practical. ‘We must start packing,’ she said, looking rather hopelessly around the room. ‘Do you suppose people who buy castles buy the furniture and the tapestries? How do you take down curtains? Are they sewn on to the rails?’
    Daisy turned from the fire. ‘What do you mean, packing?’
    â€˜Don’t be silly, Daisy. You know just what I mean,’ Rose said in a tired voice. ‘We can’t stop people coming, and if Mrs Snips hadn’t screamed, we’d be sold already.’
    â€˜Don’t you see?’
    â€˜See what? For goodness sake, Daisy. See what?’
    â€˜That we don’t have to go.’
    â€˜Oh, please. We’ve got to go, and that’s that.’
    â€˜You mean you want Hartslove to be sold?’
    â€˜Don’t be unfair,’ cried Rose. ‘Of course I don’t! But living here costs money, and we don’t have any.’ Daisy blinked. ‘And besides,’ Rose carried on, recklessly allowing her worst fears to tumble out, ‘we can’t carry on living all bound up with stones and cobwebs and the Dead Girl and the tombstones at the Resting Place. Next year I’ll be eighteen. Eighteen! Don’t you understand, Daisy? Don’t any of you?’ She could not stop now. ‘I want to have a proper life, an ordinary life, and how can I – how can any of us – have an ordinary life when nothing here is ordinary? How can we actually have any life of our own at all?’ She could see the shock on her sisters’ faces but she did not care. She could not, just
could not
, spend her whole life in a place so full of the past there was no space for anything else.
    Daisy gulped. ‘It needn’t be like that, Rose. You can have a life. We all can.’
    â€˜How?’ Rose asked, all her energy draining away. ‘How, exactly, Daisy, unless we leave here.’
    â€˜Through The One.’
    â€˜Oh, Daisy!’ Rose slumped on to the sofa next to Lily and buried her face in her hands. Lily was sitting up. ‘Don’t upset Rose any more,’ she begged.
    â€˜There’s no need to be upset. Don’t you see?’ Daisy said earnestly. ‘The One’s going to win the Derby. I absolutely believe it. And when he wins, everything’ll be different.’
    â€˜Different?’ Rose did not bother to raise her head. ‘How different? Whatever The One does, Pa will still drink; the candles will still go out; the Dead Girl will still haunt Pa’s passage; Ma still won’t come back.’
And Arthur Rose will still marry somebody else
, she thought, though she did manage to stop herself saying this out loud.
    Daisy shook her head. ‘No, Rose. It won’t be like that.’
    â€˜How will it be, then?’ Rose could not fight any more.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Daisy said. ‘But it will be good for all of us, each in our own way. I just know it.’
    Rose closed her eyes. ‘Even if you’re right,’ she said, ‘even in the hugely improbable likelihood that you are right, just tell me this: why on earth should this The One be different from any of the others?’
    Daisy held her ground. ‘I’ve never believed in any of the