Tilly Wed — Catherine Cookson

Beautiful and bewitching Tilly Trotter has served Mark Sopwith devotedly for twelve years -- his wife in all but name. But now his is dead and Tilly's whole future at Highfield Manor looks uncertain. -- Four months pregnant with Mark's child, Tilly's predicament is worsened by the hostility of his oldest grown-up child, Jessie Ann, who is determined to have Tilly banished from the Manor...

No stranger to hardship and trouble, brave and young Matilda is destined to leave her native Tyneside for a strange and distant land -- following her heart to America, where great peril awaits her...

Also published as "Tilly Wed"