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Their cook was a Mrs. Mudd, and the butler was Mr. Hoake. Pronounced “oak.”

It was almost more than the child could bear. To make matters worse, she had a cousin who said out loud the very thing Daisy was most ashamed of.

“You’re no better than the maid,” her cousin, six months older and very superior, sneered. “I bet you’re really her baby. You even look like her.”

It wasn’t true, of course. She was the spitting image of her mother. But still, the barb stuck.

The cousin would come for holidays and stay the entire summer. She’d dance around singing, “Daisy, Daisy, always crazy.”

Sometimes she was “lazy.” Sometimes, defying logic, “hazy.”

“Shithead,” muttered Daisy, and watched as her mother gave the pretty cousin the biggest slice of lemon cake at teatime. The best dress for the party. Would brush the cousin’s straight, glossy blond hair.

She watched as her mother laughed when the cousin sang the song, scolding Daisy for being so sensitive and standoffish.

“May I be excused, please?” Daisy would politely ask.

No one answered, and no one noticed when she left.

Shitheads.

Going to her room, she looked into the mirror and saw a gangly, awkward girl whose nose was too big, her hair too frizzy, her clothing ill-fitting. Her complexion sallow. Sickly.

And Daisy Wolcott said to herself, I am not the favorite child.

The housemaid of the same name heard all this, saw all this, and one day, when cleaning the girl’s room, left a picture on her bed.

When Daisy went to dress for dinner (her parents were very old, at least thirty, and very aware of proper etiquette), she found it. Taking it over to the waning light at the window, to better see the image, she was surprised to discover it was of a daisy. But it was not just any amateur watercolor.

This seemed like a page from a book. Only it hadn’t been ripped out of anything. It was carefully drawn and colored in. The flower was broken into parts, segmented. A dissection. And labeled.

The stem. The stamen. The white petals were called ray florets, and the yellow center was filled with disc florets. There was a thing called a peduncle.

“Peduncle,” she carefully pronounced. That was the green lump under the flower holding it all together.

Daisy sat on the window seat, her feet tucked under her, enchanted by the drawing. At the bottom, someone had written that the flower, this daisy, lived off of, fed off of, light.

The very concept was wonderous to the child. Imagine eating light?

She was so engrossed she completely missed the dinner bell.

No one seemed to notice, or care. Certainly no one came up to get her. To check on her. No one missed her.

But for once, Daisy didn’t mind. She was in the rich company of this wonderous flower. And, she presumed, looking out across the gardens to the meadow and the darkening forest beyond, if a daisy could feed off light, and turn it into something she could not pronounce, chlora something, then other plants and flowers must too. Grass. Bushes. Trees?

And if they could do that, what else could flowers, could plants, could trees do? The outside world, invisible to her before, came alive in that moment.

The natural world beckoned.

There was, when the sun had set and Daisy was sitting in the dark holding the paper, a small knock on the door, and a maid entered. She had a tray with a glass of milk and a plate of food. Cold roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in congealing gravy, along with some mushy green vegetable Daisy could never identify.

“I thought you might be hungry, miss,” said the housemaid.

After giving a small curtsy, she placed the tray down on the dressing table and lit an oil lamp.

“That’s pretty,” she said, pointing to the page in Daisy’s hand.

The girl moved it away and turned her back on the maid. Dismissing Daisy the housemaid without thanks for the food. Or anything else.