Fateful by Claudia Gray Page A

room and our one chamber pot that I should have guessed before. But it wasn’t until spring, until the morning I realized Daisy’s uniform was becoming tight in the waist, that I realized the truth.
    “Oh, my God,” I said, staring at her. At first she didn’t understand, but then she saw my face, and hurriedly tied on her apron. But it was too late. “Daisy, you aren’t—are you—are you going to have a baby?”
    “Don’t say anything!” she hissed.
    “I wouldn’t! But Daisy, if I can see it, others can too. Horne will see. Everyone will eventually.” And what did she expect to do when she actually had it?
    Daisy slumped onto the corner of the bed. I’ll never forget the utter desolation in her eyes. “We have to hide it as long as we can. I know it can’t be much longer. But help me, Tess. Please.”
    I knew how women got with child; you can’t grow up surrounded by farms without noticing what the rams and ewes get up to. But I couldn’t imagine who the father might have been. We were discouraged from having male “followers,” and with only one afternoon free a month—spent at our parents’ home—how would she even have found the time to meet anyone?
    That answer, at least, came to me quickly enough. “It’s someone here at Moorcliffe. The father, I mean.”
    “Don’t ask me about that.”
    “Is it Ned?” He was nearly the only young man we knew, and always friendly to us. Was he maybe more than friendly to Daisy? I’d never thought there was anything between them, but then again, I’d never suspected Daisy wasn’t a virgin.
    “It’s not Ned,” Daisy spat back at me. “Don’t be absurd.”
    “Holloway?” He was the under butler, and a handsome figure of a man, though a few years older than her.
    “No.”
    I racked my brains. There were nearly forty servants at Moorcliffe, most of them male, so the list of suspects was rather long. The chauffeur was always winking at us. “Is it Fletcher?”
    “No! Good God, Tess, do you think I’ve slept with half the household?”
    “I didn’t mean that, Daisy! I just meant—whoever he is, he has to help you.”
    “He won’t.” She spread one hand across the faint swell of her belly. “I asked. Repeatedly. If I name him, he’ll just deny it and hate me so much there’s no chance this child will ever—he’ll deny it. So I’ll never tell, not you nor anyone else.” The way she said it, I knew she truly never would.
    I started to cry. “What are you going to do?”
    “I don’t know.” Daisy leaned her head into her palm. “I don’t know.”
    Horne figured it out two weeks later. She called Daisy a slut and a whore, and of course she went right to Lady Regina with the information. Lady Regina did what any other fine Christian noblewoman would have done upon learning that one of her unmarried servant girls was pregnant: She fired Daisy and threw her out of the house that very day, with only a fraction of the wages she was entitled to. I cried as I watched her walk down the long path away from the back of the house, until Horne boxed my ears and told me to get back to work.
    I knew there would be no question of her returning to our parents’ house. As soon as my father learned she’d become pregnant out of wedlock, he’d call her worse names than Horne did, and throw her out even faster than Lady Regina had. On my next afternoon off, instead of going home, I sought her out in the village. What few coins she’d had, she’d used to rent a room in a disreputable boardinghouse. When we saw each other, she was so much bigger, and so much paler and wearier, that I sobbed just to look at her.
    Once I’d calmed myself, Daisy handed me a knotted handkerchief that held something heavy inside. “When you get your next afternoon off, don’t come back here. I need you to go to Salisbury.”
    I’d never been anywhere as enormous as Salisbury in my life. And so far away—perhaps even five miles! “What do you want me to do