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Gertrude Wyndham had come to Providence as a young bride and had somehow fused an ill-knit family together and made the beautiful old house a place of refuge and healing. And then the war came. Her daughter Sybil never returned from France. Defying all convention she went to live with Henri Blanchard, twenty years older than herself, a man who, for years, had been in love with her mother. Ned Wyndham, the beloved son and heir of Providence, returned from the trenches a shell-shocked ghost locked into his own private hell. Only at Providence did he appear to return to some kind of tranquillity - and now it seemed as though the house must be sold, for the war had devastated the fortunes of the Wyndhams as well as Ned's sanity. It was Lucy who was to save their home. Frank Thornley, son of a wealthy Birmingham factory owner, desperately loved the third child of Providence. If she married him, the house and the family would be saved. And so Lucy, young, warm, vibrant, married Frank whom she did not love, and hoped that, in time, Providence would make everything come right for all of them.
'Long-shanks Gertie' the village children called her, chasing her all the way to school. It was because she was different, with her long legs and long dark hair and clean pinafore. And, as the daughter of the land-agent on Providence, she accepted that she didn't belong anywhere - not part of the village, and not part of the Squire's family at the Big House. But she was fascinated by Squire Wyndham's family - Louise, the arrogant daughter of the house who never missed an opportunity of snubbing her. James, who was handsome and wonderful and charming - and who was one day to break her heart. And William, the heir, quiet, bookish, and almost as much as misfit as she was. But above all there was Lady Hester. It was Lady Hester who saw something in Gertrude that no one else had perceived - a quality of strength and endurance that would serve the family well. Between them Lady Hester and Gertrude Hoskins were to be the salvation of Providence.
Young Janey Rowland lived in Linden Mews, in the flat over the garage. She was the housekeeper's daughter, the chauffeur's daughter, and even though she was a bright and sensitive child, she had been taught to know her place when it came to going round to the big house - the Marchant house - in Linden Square. But the two families - on the surface separated by a gulf of birth, wealth and breeding - were deeply involved and reliant on each other. Old secrets, old emotions, seethed beneath the respectable facade they preserved between them. And then the war came. As the barriers between the Marchants and the Rowlands began to crumble, so Jane - quiet, beautiful, and with a great capacity for love - began to become more and more the hub of the wealthy Marchant family, the one on whom they all depended, the one who had to unravel and solve the emotional disasters left over from the past.
James Rushton dominated both his thriving wine business and large family with all the style of an old autocrat.It was part of his plans that Jane, his only daughter - already thirty-one and likely to become a spinster if she wasn't careful - should marry her cousin William, not a love-match exactly, but highly convenient for the family. But Jane, slight, plain, quiet, wanted more than William's obedient acquiescence, for she had loved her careless handsome cousin for a long time.On the point of settling for the little she could have, she discovered a shameless betrayal.Humiliated, not really wanted at home, she took the most daring decision of her life - to go and live and work in Italy. It was to be the beginning of a long, passionate, and overwhelming involvement with the Buonaventura family, aristocratic, and torn apart by the strife of Mussolini's new Italy.To Jane, Ottavio Buonaventura and his family were a fascinating challenge.And the impoverished aristocrats at Castagnolo were to discover that the quiet Englishwoman was to revolutionise their lives.
When Lavinia St Clyst married Julian Bossiney at St George's, Hanover Square, it was a marriage of convenience on both sides.Julian was linked at last to the real, the old aristocracy, and Lavinia, tolerated as a poor relation of the wealthy St Clyst family, could finally free herself from living on her uncle's charity and have a home of her own.It was at the fashionable wedding reception that - too late - she met the man she should have married - Jonathan Bossiney, her husband's brother. As she began her new life in the beautiful old stone house standing high on the Cornish cliffs, so she determined that the unspoken love between her and Jonathan would remain secret and unfulfilled.For her children, Tristram and Jennifer, things would be different.There would be no obstacles to their love.But as the years passed, so the family pattern was repeated, of lovers divided by class, by wealth, by the very passion and wildness of their Cornish blood.It was not until the third generation that at last the cruel divisions were healed, and Lavinia also found her abiding happiness.
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Leonie Harcourt finds herself pregnant by her Parisian lover, Luc Gosselin. Luc doesn't return after the Great War, but Leonie keeps a small locked suitcase that Luc gave her--and it is this that will connect her at last with the Gosselin family.
Contemporary relationships.
Romance.