Bella can’t wait to be married to her fiancée Sidney, and dreams of the day she will walk up the aisle to be given away by her widowed father, with her bookish sister Alice as her bridesmaid.
Their lives are disturbed when they receive a letter from their fifteen-year-old cousin Millie. Taken in by her austere aunt and uncle when her parents were killed in an accident, Millie says she is being badly treated and pleads to be rescued.
When the two sisters take a trip to find out the truth, things take a troubling turn. Millie is brought home to live with them, her only possessions her ill-fitting clothes and a tatty suitcase.
But soon they are questioning this act of kindness. Does their teenaged cousin just need some love and kindness? Or is she a troublemaker, with only mischief and malice on her mind...?
Josephine Cox was born in Blackburn, one of ten children. At the age of sixteen, Josephine met and married her husband Ken, and had two sons. When the boys started school, she decided to go to college and eventually gained a place at Cambridge University. She was unable to take this up as it would have meant living away from home, but she went into teaching – and started to write her first full-length novel. She won the ‘Superwoman of Great Britain’ Award, for which her family had secretly entered her, at the same time as her novel was accepted for publication.