The Bird Of Happiness

A sequel to The Women of Providence.

Sally Stewart was brought up in London. She initially worked for the Reader's Digest before setting up her own business with her husband and then becoming an academic. After wining a magazine story competition she starting writing novels, including A Rose for Every Month, The Women of Providence, The Bird of Happiness, Echoes in the Square, The Land of Nightingales and The Snows of Springtime.

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.

The Land Of Nightingales

1919 - when Phoebe Maynard - after her mother had died - found the old journal in the attic it reminded her of several things -of her early childhood growing up in Spain, of her father's distress whenever she spoke of that country, and of her mother's long years of fretful ill-health once they had returned to their Oxfordshire manor house.Phoebe, and her sister, Lydia, had never understood why the 'land of nightingales' was such an emotive subject within the family, but when their father died it suddenly became clear.His will revealed that Phoebe and Lydia had a Spanish half-brother - Juan Rodriguez. 
 
It seemed that Juan was as shocked as they were by his foreign connections and was determined to have nothing to do with his English relatives - but the blood-tie was there. 
 
As Phoebe and Lydia finally found a happiness of their own in England, the past constantly intruded on their tranquil lives.It was when young Holly, Phoebe's orphaned niece-by-marriage, came onto the scene that the two worlds met and exploded into an emotional turmoil that was to be made even more violent as Holly and Juan found themselves caught up in the turbulence of the Spanish Civil War.

The Snows Of Springtime

A woman meets the man of her dreams, but he is not the man she has just married.

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.

The Women Of Providence

'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.

Echoes In The Square

Two families seemingly very different but with intertwined fates.

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.

Sally Stewart

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.

Sally Stewart

Books by Sally Stewart

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