Daisy Chain

Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

Lily and Jeanie, Kirkcudbright, Scotland, 1901 Two young girls sit in the green-golden shade of a weeping willow. The buttery late-afternoon sun dapples their arms and lights up their heads, one dark and one copper, bent together over a daisy chain. Their fingers are stained with the juice from the stems and they are whispering, their voices dipping and diving like swallows.

They are safe in their secret green chamber where they are weaving their hopes for a life that stretches before them and will take them over the Galloway Hills and beyond. The peculiar, magical light dances on their skin, shimmering and changing colour, iridescent as a trout in a gravel stream. Lily and Jeanie. Lily as pale as the creamy milk that comes from the herd in the pasture below, Jeanie as brown as the hazelnuts gathered by her friends, the tinkers encamped on the sandy beach known as the Doon.

Lily crowns her friend with a daisy garland and sits back on her heels to admire the way the tiny white petals edged with pink sit on Jeanie’s untidy dark curls. “When I’m a famous artist, I will paint you every day,” she says. “You’re the queen of the forest.”

Jeanie’s teeth flash in a face smudged with dirt. “No, you’re the one that’s more like a queen.” She edges closer. “Tell me again where we’ll live when we are grown women?”

Lily lets her hands rest in her lap and closes her eyes. “In my studio in Glasgow.”

“The city! That would be fine, just fine. We can eat cream cakes off fancy plates with silver forks. And I’ll be a famous dancer. The tinkers have been learning me to tumble and the high-wire lady shows me fancy tricks like pirouettes and the splits. She used to be a dancer and told me there’s a theatre in Glasgow with its own sea for the mermaids, and a waterfall for the horses that come galloping through the water with reallive injuns riding them. I’ll wear a sparkly costume and feathers in my hair and kick higher than all the other dancers. But don’t worry, I’ll be sure to give you a wee wave in the audience.”

“I’ll have to be quick with my pencil if I’m to sketch all that,” Lily says.

About the author

Freelance journalist and author Maggie Richie was born in

India and grew up in Zambia, Spain and Venezuela before settling in Scotland.

Daisy Chain is published by Two Roads, £16.99