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Book set in England, cannot remember title?

jenroo

New Member
As I said the book was set in England in around the 1800's. It starts off with a child being born in the womans mothers house, only the mother and midwife are in the room. The father walks in to check if everything is okay, he sees the midwife standing over the new born with a pillow about to smoother the child - but he stops her. The child was a girl (named either Belle or Bella - I think!) and the reason the midwife wanted to smoother her was the fact she was deformed.
After this the mother, father and baby Belle move back to their home in the countryside. The mother then falls pregnant again and the little girl Belle is learning to walk and crawl. The father is a farmer and checks on the cows and leaves the dog outside the barn - but he gets in-between a cow and her calf. The cow pushes the father up against the wall and he dies from the pressure. The woman runs out when she hears the dog barking and finds her husband - she ends up having a miscarriage.

The book then goes onto say that the woman and Belle end up living with the woman's parents. And with the parents is their two orphaned grandchildren - a boy and a girl.(The book seems to hint that the father died in a fire and could have been in a previous book as part of a series) The grandparents seems to be in the upper middle class of wealth.
When the girl learns to walk she keeps falling over - the grandparents learn that she has dislocated hip and therefore have special shoes made for her.

There is a good bit of the book I don't remember but what I remember next was the orphaned grandchild (the girl) ends up falling in love with a servant/ gardener/ hired help. But they get caught by her grandparents (also I think she could have been pregnant) and plan to run away together but (I don't remember how or why) they were both shot dead (it wasn't a member of the family.)

That's the most I can remember of the book.
I do remember reading that it was published in and around the 1970/80s. The book was a paper back, and was fairly big about three or four hundred pages - in kind of small font. As I said above, I think the book was part of a series, not on the one person but on a family i.e. brothers, sisters, parents etc..I'm nearly sure it is not Catherine Cookson who wrote the book.
I hope I have provided enough information -
Thank you for taking the time to look at this! :)
 
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