HartsLove by K.M. Grant Page B

others,’ she said.
    Rose pulled herself together. Daisy must be made to face the truth. She opened her eyes and addressed her sister very slowly. ‘But Pa has, Daisy. He’s believed every single one. And you know as well as I do that even he doesn’t believe in this one. Why else would he have been going to take that cheque?’ She blew her nose on the handkerchief Arthur Rose had given her at the bird’s funeral. It was the end, and they had better get used to it. She got up, smoothed her skirt and made for the door.
    Daisy got there before her. She would not let Rose leave the room. ‘Pa’s so full of brandy he doesn’t know whathe believes,’ she said. ‘Please listen, Rose. Please. Today Hartslove helped us. When I told those people Garth was a ghost, they believed me because of the mist. If we can do that once, we can do it again.’
    â€˜It was just luck that Garth looked like a ghost,’ Rose said, her impatience, never far beneath the surface, resurgent again. ‘If it’d been spring, with the sun shining, he wouldn’t have looked like a ghost at all and the cheque would already be in the bank.’
    â€˜It wasn’t luck,’ Daisy said, doggedly determined. ‘It was a stopgap.’
    â€˜A what?’ asked Clover and Columbine.
    â€˜A stopgap.’
    â€˜Is that a special type of ghost?’
    â€˜No,’ said Daisy. ‘A stopgap’s something that holds things together until they can be properly fixed.’
    â€˜And when exactly will everything be properly fixed?’ asked Rose. She tried not sound sarcastic, but it was hard.
    â€˜In one hundred and forty-eight days,’ Daisy said.
    â€˜One hundred and forty-eight days?’
    â€˜That’s how long it is until The One’s Derby.’
    A long pause followed this announcement. Rose did not know what to say. Eventually Clover, or perhaps Columbine, broke in. ‘One hundred and forty-eight days is forever. If we’ve no money, we’ll never survive that long. We shall starve. We shall freeze. We shall die.’ There had been an article about such a family in the copy of the
Guardian
they were currently digesting. Clover and Columbine began to imagine their own obituaries.
    â€˜Be quiet!’ Rose barked. She looked at Daisy. ‘You’ve actually worked it out? To the day?’ she asked, almost incredulous.
    â€˜It’s one hundred and forty-eight days to the race, including the day of the Derby itself. I looked it up in Pa’s racing book,’ Daisy explained. Nobody contradicted her, so she continued. ‘I’m thinking, you see, that though we can’t stop people coming to look round, we could put them off, just as happened today. I mean, one hundred and forty-eight days isn’t that many, really, and some days nobody will come at all. Obviously we can’t rely on mist, and we don’t want Garth to . . . to . . .’ she swallowed. ‘What I mean is that we could do our own hauntings, inside.’
    Clover and Columbine were agog. ‘We could dress up as dead de Granvilles, you mean?’
    â€˜That kind of thing,’ said Daisy.
    â€˜Stopgap ghosts!’ The twins’ eyes sparkled. ‘It would be fun. Perhaps one of the visitors will have a heart attack and die and we could write their death notice and get published.’ The prospect was glorious.
    Daisy ignored this. ‘What do you think, Rose?’ she asked tentatively. Rose’s support was crucial. ‘The One will win, Rose, he will.’
    Rose hit her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘Forthe love of God, Daisy! Just stop it with that when I’m trying to think what Ma would do!’
    â€˜That’s easy, Rose,’ said Lily, in an intervention none of them expected. In the firelight, her face, even paler than usual, shone. ‘Ma would do nothing. She’d just drift, like the Dead Girl.’ She