  We study theoretically the dynamics of an ``xxz'' spin necklace coupled to a
conduction electron sea, a model system for a nanostructure in a dissipative
environment. We extract the long-time behavior via a mapping to a multichannel
Coulomb gas problem followed by a scaling analysis. The strong quantum
fluctuations of the necklace cause a nontrivial dependence of couplings on
system size which we extract via an analysis involving the ``boundary condition
changing operator'', and confirm via a detailed numerical evaluation of one
case.
