The Rainbow Years (51 page)

Authors: Rita Bradshaw

BOOK: The Rainbow Years

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As the years went by and the four grew into healthy and confident adults, more children were added to the family in the cottage. Foster children this time. More sad and sometimes defiant little faces that spoke of things children should never be called upon to bear but whose healing was slow but sure in the love they received.

Life was not always a bowl of cherries but it was family life, rich and varied and full of ups and downs.

The precious miniature of Bess had pride of place in the middle of the big wooden mantelpiece in the sitting room of the cottage, but it was to a little arbour in what was once the meadow - which had long since been landscaped into a garden-cum-adventure playground - that Amy was most often drawn. She always went there when she needed to find a sense of peace and direction for some problem or other.

The arbour had been built on the spot where she and Nick had embraced that first summer’s evening so long ago when she had come back to him, and there was a small plaque mounted on the back of the wooden seat inside it.

It read: