Sunday Small—Daisy Branning

Sunday Small and Daisy Branning form a sisterly friendship sustained by visits, practical care, and confidences that neither can easily share elsewhere. Its defining movement is from separation to chosen closeness: Sunday leaves the workhouse, but returns for Daisy, brings her into a new household, and stands beside her through an unwanted pregnancy and its consequences. After Daisy’s death, their friendship persists as mourning, remembered in shared grief and repeated visits to her grave.

Friendship Across Separation

When Sunday returns to the workhouse as a visitor, the change in her position is tangible. She remembers scrubbing its floor as a resident, while Daisy and Tommy Branning are still inside. At the appointed visiting hour, Miss Frost has Daisy and Tommy summoned; they hurry over to Sunday, and Daisy looks at Sunday’s dress with envy. Sunday uses their limited time to describe her new home, including its dog, cats, walled vegetable garden, and overgrown orchard. The account offers Daisy a glimpse of the life Sunday has entered, but it also makes the distance between them visible: Sunday has left, while Daisy remains in the girls’ quarters.

The visit ends with Daisy admitting how much she misses Sunday. The other girls are much younger, she explains, and she has no one there with whom she can really talk. Sunday answers that she misses Daisy too and promises to find a way to get her out. The promise gives shape to their friendship: Sunday does not treat leaving the workhouse as a private escape, but as the beginning of an effort to bring her friend into safety and companionship. When she leaves, the journey back to Whittleford feels twice as long, and she worries that she has lost her way.

A Shared Home and a Difficult Confidence

Sunday’s visits continue after the first reunion. A later visit unsettles her: Daisy appears more tense than before, keeps glancing towards the door, and plucks at the skirts of her dress rather than joining the conversation. Although Daisy manages a smile and a peck on the cheek at parting, Sunday remains troubled by the change. Her attention to these small signs prompts her to raise with Mrs Spooner the possibility of bringing Daisy and Tommy to live and work at the household.

When Daisy and Tommy arrive, Sunday rushes down the steps to welcome them. Daisy is assigned cleaning duties and Tommy outdoor work, including gardening and repairs. Biddy Spooner remarks that Daisy looks fragile, and Sunday immediately speaks up for her, insisting that she is stronger than she appears. The moment makes Sunday’s care both emotional and practical: she argues for Daisy’s capacity while helping secure the circumstances in which her friend can be near her.

Once the two are settled, Daisy reveals that Albert Pinnegar had made her go to his office and hurt her; when she threatened to tell, he threatened to send Tommy to Hatter’s Hall. Sunday understands that reporting what happened could expose Daisy to further harm, as Cissie Burns had suffered after her own experience with Pinnegar. She therefore decides not to disclose Daisy’s account at once. Instead, she asks Daisy to keep wearing a loose dress so that her pregnancy will not be noticed while they consider what to do. Sunday holds her protectively and feels Daisy’s heart hammering beneath her arms. When Tommy calls from outside the room, Sunday urges Daisy to dry her eyes and carry on as if nothing is wrong. The concealment is not indifference: it is a hurried attempt to protect Daisy while preserving time to find a safer course.

Pregnancy, Fear, and the Limits of Reassurance

The friendship becomes harder to sustain as Daisy’s pregnancy advances. She tells Sunday that she hates the child growing inside her and sometimes wishes she could go to sleep and never wake up rather than bear it. Sunday gently counters that those caring for Daisy are doing their best and suggests she may feel differently when she sees and holds the baby. Daisy rejects the reassurance, while acknowledging the kindness she has received, including an offer of somewhere to live from Annie. Sunday embraces her and says they can wait to see how she feels. She recognizes that the answer is inadequate, but cannot think of anything more to offer. Daisy returns to her work with the weight of her distress still upon her.

Later, when the baby is present, Daisy calls it evil and says she wants nothing to do with it because it carries a part of its father. In tears, she asks whether they could give it away. Sunday’s response draws on the most painful fact of her own life: she was left on the workhouse steps and grew up without knowing whether her mother had died or had simply not wanted her. She remembers imagining that her mother might one day return, then explains that she has had to let go of that hope. Sunday asks Daisy to consider what abandonment might mean to the child. This appeal does not erase Daisy’s feelings; Daisy is ashamed, but the narrative makes clear that nothing anyone says can change the burden she feels. Their exchange exposes a sharp difference in experience: Sunday sees the child through the wound of her own abandonment, while Daisy experiences the pregnancy through the violence and fear attached to its conception.

Bereavement and Remembrance

When the police report that a young pregnant woman’s body has been found in the canal and that the description matches Daisy, Tommy cries out in denial. Sunday knows that the sound will remain with her, and grief engulfs her too. Her attachment to Daisy is bound up with her closeness to Tommy, but the loss is also her own: the friend she had tried to protect and bring out of the workhouse is gone.

Daisy is buried in Chilvers Coton churchyard, in a grave placed as close as possible to her parents. At the graveside, Tommy stares at the fine mahogany coffin and grips Sunday’s hand, unable to accept that Daisy is dead. Sunday answers through her own tears, unusually unable to hold them back. After the mourners leave, she gives Tommy a moment alone with his sister. The gesture shows her care extending to his grief even as she mourns Daisy herself.

In the spring, Sunday takes Nell on walks through the woods in Hartshill on the way to visit Cissie and Lady Huntley. The two girls often pick flowers to lay on Daisy’s grave. This repeated act gives the friendship a quiet afterlife: Sunday cannot restore Daisy or fulfill the promise to bring her into a lasting shared future, but she continues to remember her through visits and offerings. The relationship thus moves from daily companionship and urgent protection to a bond carried in grief, whose most durable expression is the care Sunday keeps giving to Daisy’s memory.