This Cold Country by Annabel Davis-Goff

isn’t supposed to tell us about, and I’m on a training course that allows for flexibility. We were lucky; the army isn’t really the non-stop party it seems to be.”
    They sat in silence for a few minutes. The part of the room near the fire was warm; Daisy gazed into the embers and felt reasonably content. Sitting beside a fire in a pretty dress was not what she had come all this way for, but it did make her failure less humiliating. After a moment the maid came back with two glasses of champagne and shortly afterward Daisy thought a gesture of grace on her part would be only fair.
    â€œI liked my Christmas card,” she said.
    â€œTo ferrets,” Patrick said, raising his glass.
    â€œI like them, you know,” she said, laughing at the toast, but meaning what she said.
    â€œI know.”
    â€œI feel rather like a ferret in this house.”
    â€œI think I already mentioned I come from the Irish side of the family.”
    Daisy smiled, feeling the delighted leap of her spirits she always experienced when talking to someone with whom it was not necessary to bridge parts of a train of thought. Then she hesitated and was silent.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?”
    Daisy hesitated again for a moment before deciding, more for her own sake than for Patrick’s, to tell him what she had been thinking.
    â€œYesterday evening I had just as cozy a chat with James—in the library.”
    â€œWe’re a family famous for our easy charm and treachery. Historically it was the principal reason the main branch survived; that and an ability to convert from one devoutly held religious belief to another—overnight, if necessary.”
    â€œI was thinking more of the ease with which I succumbed to the effortless charm of the aristocracy.”
    Patrick didn’t respond. Then, after a moment he asked, “Do you know what the Sargasso Sea is?”
    â€œThis isn’t going to be a geography quiz, is it?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt’s where eels—all eels—go to mate.” As she spoke, it seemed to Daisy one of those beliefs, like old wives’ tales, that don’t bear too close examination. It seemed also as though Patrick had skipped—or skipped articulating—part of the thought that had taken their conversation from her susceptibility to masculine Nugent charm to some not yet revealed but distant area. “Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic?”
    â€œRather closer to America. Think of Bermuda. It’s a sea, comparatively warm, named for sargassum—you know, the kind of seaweed you find on beaches after a storm. The Gulf Stream moves huge islands of sargassum around in a large drifting circle. Things live in the seaweed islands.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œThose clumps of seaweed are small maritime universes to fishes and snails. Complete with cycles of revolution and, I imagine, evolution.”
    Daisy thought about it for a moment; the image was pleasing. She considered the endless repetition of day and night, the hot sun warming the salt water, the clear star-filled nights, and she had a crude but pleasing comprehension of eternity. It seemed easier to imagine than her father’s devout belief in a more conventional but less easily described afterlife.
    â€œI am a minor fish—imagining I have choices or reactions when all I’m doing is living in an island of seaweed itself dependent on an ocean current,” Daisy said.
    â€œThe seaweed is more substantial and longer lived, but it hasn’t more control over its own existence. Every now and then there is a storm a little more powerful than the ones that particular cycle of nature has come to expect. And the island is thrown out of the circle—the loop—its own version of what it imagines to be perpetual motion.”
    â€œAnd the fishes and things die.”
    â€œOr move on to another island. Everything goes on as before. Then, once in a thousand