Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       Copyright

       CHAPTER ONE

      IT was cold and damp. The mist, which had been no more than tiny wisps veiling the highest peaks of the Lakeland mountains on her journey to the children’s home earlier that afternoon, had now descended as far as the road she was walking along, Amber noticed wearily. It was also growing dark; a strange eerie darkness, unlike the city twilight she was more accustomed to. She shivered, drawing her thin suede coat closer around her almost too angular body, her right leg dragging slightly as she tried to increase her walking pace. Her leg. She grimaced to herself as she glanced impotently at the limb she was fast coming to consider the author of all her misfortunes, including this latest unsuccessful attempt to obtain a job. She had been so full of hope when she set out from Birmingham this morning, buoying herself up during the long train ride by reminding herself of the excellence of her qualifications. Not only was she a fully qualified teacher, but she also had over a year’s nursing experience. Her eyes went involuntarily to her leg again. Six months now since the accident; six months! It seemed to Amber that six centuries separated the happy, fulfilled girl of twenty she had been from the bitter, maimed person she was now, and the irony of the whole thing was that it needn’t have happened at all.

      She had been on her way to work at the time. Having qualified as a teacher, she had left university just in time to find herself a victim of local government education cuts, and so instead had decided to train as a nurse. Rob had been full of approval. He was on the point of finishing his own medical training—he wanted to go into private practice, though, which meant specialising, a costly business both in terms of money and time, but with Amber working as a nurse they should be able to bring the date of their wedding forward. That was what Amber had been thinking about as she walked to the large hospital on her way to work. She didn’t have to walk very far, living as she did in a nearby student nurses’ home, and her mind had been on Rob and his bombshell of the previous evening—that he intended to go out to Saudi Arabia to work for two years. He had been offered a plum job as assistant to an eminent plastic surgeon working in the Middle East, a chance he simply could not afford to pass up, as he had earnestly explained to Amber. She had been dismayed by his news. They had met at university and she had known that because of Rob’s chosen career it would be several years before they could marry, but she had visualised him specialising at one of the large Birmingham hospitals—not thousands of miles away.

      She had noticed the bus stopping ahead of her as an automatic reflex action; the giggling children disgorged on to the pavement; the small yellow-raincoated little, girl stepping out behind the bus; the car speeding towards her. Her reaction had been automatic, and ridiculously unnecessary. The child—streetwise—had managed to avoid the skidding wheels of the car, and it was Amber, who had so recklessly gone to her rescue, who had been tossed like a rag doll to lie inert and unconscious in the road.

      She had been lucky, or so they tried to convince her, but Amber didn’t consider a leg which because of its torn and destroyed muscles might never move properly again to be something to feel grateful for, and had said so, even when the surgeon told her gravely that she was lucky to have it, and that there had been talk of amputation. And there were also the scars; horrible, maiming scars, running along the slender length of her thigh and marring the slender perfection of her calf. At first she had refused to accept the truth; she would walk properly again. But it was six months now since the accident and she knew that no amount of willpower was ever going to restore her right leg to the lithe manoeuvrability it had once had. There was a slight chancé, Mr Savage, the consultant, had told her when she demanded to be told the truth; a very risky and highly technical operation only available in America, but it cost many thousands of pounds, and was not guaranteed to be successful, and then there would be the plastic surgery to remove her scars.

      Rob had been understanding at first, but then there had been those evenings when he had not visited her; those conversations about the necessity of a successful society doctor having a glamorous, elegant wife. He hadn’t needed to labour the point. Amber had understood, and when she offered to call things off, he had agreed without protest. That night after he had gone had been the first time she had cried. She had never felt more alone in her life. Who did, she have to turn to? Her father had died when she was eight and her mother had remarried while Amber was at university. She liked her stepfather, but they weren’t a close family. Her mother was easily upset and had wept bitterly on the one occasion she had come to visit Amber in hospital. It had been impossible for her to go on working at the hospital; hence the necessity for her journey here today to the Lake District. The moment she had seen the advertisement for a junior housemother at a children’s home, her hopes had started to rise. They had been most enthusiastic over the telephone; right up until the moment they had seen her, in fact.

      Like sharp knives she could clearly recall the interviewer’s voice, pitying but firm, as she explained that whoever got the job would need to be agile and tireless—looking after about twenty-five children ranging from thirteen downwards was a very demanding job. And not suitable for a cripple, Amber told herself bitterly.

      She shivered suddenly as the mist reached out damp tendrils towards her. Who would guess that it was May? It was cold enough to be the middle of winter. Of course, it was pretty high up here, and if she hadn’t lingered to watch the trout in the mountain stream she wouldn’t have missed her bus, and there would have been no necessity for her to trudge down this seemingly endless road, although she distinctly remembered seeing a sign in the village on the way up announcing that it was merely a mile and a half to Inchmere House, the children’s home.

      Gritting her teeth against the nagging pain from her torn muscles, she kept on walking. Pain was something she had grown used to living with. The doctors had prescribed various drugs, but she had refused them. Sometimes she thought the only thing that kept her going was her constant battle not to give in. She had been so full of hope this morning. The job would have provided her with a means of earning her living and a roof over her head, both important considerations, as since leaving the hospital she had been depleting her small savings on the rent of a shabby, chilly room in a Birmingham boarding house, and the necessities of day-to-day living.

      She could have turned to her mother, but pride had prevented her; the same pride which had forced her to smile and look pleased when her mother announced her stepfather’s plans for retirement in Spain. In another two weeks they would be gone, and then she would be completely on her own.

      Weak tears of self-pity welled in her eyes and she dashed them away angrily. It was pointless thinking about what was past; she could never have lived with her parents anyway, even if they had offered her a home.