Start Where The Horses Ran

Shannon, September 1940. The harvest was late that year — Old Joseph said it always was when the rains came from the east instead of the west. Daphne did not know whether this was true or whether Old Joseph simply liked saying things that sounded as though they might be. She was fourteen and she had lived at Shannon for as long as she could remember and she had learned that Old Joseph said a great many things with great certainty and was wrong about roughly half of them.

She was looking for the tin trunk. Her mother had told her it was in the old storeroom behind the stables — the one where the tack was kept in winter. She had also told her not to look for it. These two pieces of information were, in Daphne's experience, generally the most useful combination her mother ever provided.