Daisy

Daisy is an orphaned young woman whose story traces the consequences of institutional vulnerability into adult life: after Albert Pinnegar assaults her and threatens her brother, she faces a pregnancy she does not want and cannot imagine welcoming. Her eventual murder by Miss Frost makes her suffering irreversible, but the disclosure of the crime also exposes the danger that had shadowed her and Cissie Burns inside the workhouse.

Identity and Circumstances

Daisy is the sister of Tommy Branning. The two have lost their parents, and their orphanhood leaves them without the family protection that might otherwise have helped them challenge those with authority over them. When Daisy is buried, Biddy Spooner arranges for her grave to be as close as possible to her parents’ in Chilvers Coton churchyard. That placement gives physical form to the family ties that remain important even after death: Daisy is laid near the parents she lost, while Tommy is left to mourn the sister who had shared his life.

Their vulnerability is set against the workhouse’s division of its residents into separate sections for women, boys, girls, and men. Inmates undertake assigned labor, and families have little opportunity to come together except on Sundays. The institution’s routines therefore offer neither the privacy nor the independence that might allow a girl such as Daisy to speak safely about abuse. The workhouse’s strict hierarchy matters to her story not only as a setting but as a condition that gives Pinnegar access to her and makes his threats credible.

Assault and Disclosure

Daisy’s crisis comes into view after Sunday Small has left the workhouse. Daisy tells Sunday that Pinnegar began summoning her to his office and assaulting her. When she threatened to report him, he used Tommy’s vulnerability against her, threatening to send him to Hatter’s Hall. Daisy’s account links the abuse directly to the power Pinnegar held over workhouse residents: her silence is not consent, but the result of a threat against someone she loves.

Sunday recognizes Daisy’s pregnancy and understands what it may mean because she had previously heard Cissie describe a similar situation. Daisy confirms that Pinnegar is responsible. Sunday considers telling Lady Lavinia Huntley and Biddy Spooner, but fears that disclosure might expose Daisy to the same fate Cissie suffered when she was taken to Hatter’s Hall. She instead promises to keep the discovery private for the time being and suggests that Daisy’s loose dress might conceal the pregnancy while they decide what to do. Sunday’s response is protective, but it also shows how earlier institutional failures have made even seeking help seem dangerous.

Daisy’s account echoes Cissie’s experience without making the two women’s outcomes identical. Cissie had confided that she was pregnant after Pinnegar forced himself on her, and later pleaded not to be sent to an asylum where she expected never to be released. When Lady Lavinia Huntley questioned Mr Crackett about Cissie’s baby, he said that it had died at birth; Lady Lavinia suspected that it might instead have been sold. Daisy’s pregnancy thus unfolds in a world where both a mother’s safety and a child’s fate can be obscured by institutional authority.

Pregnancy and Constrained Choices

After Pinnegar loses his position, Daisy remains distressed. Lady Lavinia Huntley has ensured that she will not have to worry financially for some time, and Annie has offered her a place to live, yet practical assistance cannot undo the assault or settle Daisy’s feelings about the pregnancy. Daisy says she hates the child growing inside her and sometimes wishes she could go to sleep and not wake. Her despair is presented as a serious consequence of what has happened to her, rather than as a moral failing or a problem that security alone can solve.

Daisy is also clear that she cannot imagine loving the baby. She regards it as carrying a part of Pinnegar and rejects Sunday’s attempt to distinguish the innocent child from the man who fathered it. At her most distressed, she asks whether the child could be given away. Sunday answers from her own experience of abandonment: left at the workhouse as a baby, she had grown up imagining that her mother might return, before accepting that she might have been unwanted or that her mother was dead. Sunday’s plea asks Daisy to consider what abandonment might mean to the child, but it does not erase Daisy’s own burden. The exchange holds two painful realities together: the child’s need for care and Daisy’s inability, after violence, to feel the welcome others hope she will offer.

The episode also marks the limits of the choices available to Daisy. Her pregnancy begins in coercion; fear for Tommy has constrained her ability to report Pinnegar; and the prospect of giving birth does not bring her a sense of hope. The kindness of Lady Lavinia Huntley and Annie offers material support, but the evidence does not show Daisy reaching a settled decision about motherhood before her death.

Death and Aftermath

Daisy is later reported missing. The police tell Tommy Branning that a young woman, pregnant and near her time, has been found in the canal, and that the description fits his sister. Tommy’s anguished response tells Sunday Small that Daisy has died before the body is formally identified. At the funeral, the Reverend Edgar Lockett conducts the service in Chilvers Coton churchyard. The fine mahogany coffin is placed as near as possible to Daisy’s parents’ grave, and Tommy stands beside it holding Sunday’s hand. He describes his grief as feeling unreal, as though he might wake and find Daisy smiling and caring for him again. Sunday weeps with him.

Daisy’s death is subsequently connected to the wider pattern of Miss Frost’s violence. When Miss Frost holds Sunday captive, she admits that she pushed Daisy and the unborn child into the canal. Sunday later tells Tom Branning that Miss Frost killed Daisy and Pinnegar. Tom has learned that the police released the man they initially arrested for Pinnegar’s murder after someone reported seeing Miss Frost flee Pinnegar’s cottage with a knife. Daisy’s death is therefore not left as an unexplained accident: the disclosure identifies her killer and links the attack to Miss Frost’s fixation on Pinnegar and resentment toward Sunday.

The revelation clarifies the danger that had been concealed behind the workhouse’s earlier regime. After Miss Frost’s departure, conditions there improve: meals become better, bullying and fear recede, and the new matron breaks Miss Frost’s split cane and throws it away. These changes come too late to protect Daisy. Her fate remains a measure of the cost of abuse that was allowed to persist, even as the institution begins to change.

Relationships and Narrative Significance

Daisy’s closest relationships shape both her decisions and the meaning of her death. Fear for Tommy helps keep her silent when Pinnegar threatens to send him away; after she dies, Tommy’s grief makes clear that their sibling bond is not incidental to the story. Sunday, who has herself known abandonment and workhouse hardship, becomes Daisy’s confidante and tries to protect her without exposing her to a system she distrusts. Their conversations make Daisy’s predicament more than a sequence of events: they show the conflict between compassion for an unborn child and the suffering of the woman carrying it.

Daisy’s story also parallels Cissie Burns’s. Both young women disclose pregnancies caused by Pinnegar, and both encounter threats and institutional indifference rather than reliable protection. Cissie is taken to Hatter’s Hall; Daisy remains with people willing to help her, but is later murdered by Miss Frost. The contrast shows that private kindness can offer shelter without being able to control every danger around a vulnerable woman.

In the larger narrative, Daisy’s death is at once a personal loss and a delayed revelation. Her pregnancy, distress, and fear establish the human consequences of Pinnegar’s abuse; her murder connects those consequences to Miss Frost’s violence; and the funeral gives Tommy and Sunday a shared scene of mourning. Daisy does not survive to resolve her feelings about the child or recover the choices taken from her. Instead, the story preserves her through the relationships she leaves behind and through the truth that is finally spoken about her death.