The Sapphire Child (The Raj Hotel #2) - Janet MacLeod Trotter Page 0,109

at the creature feeding from her, amazed at the newborn’s instinctive ability to know what to do. She had dark eyes that fixed unfocused on the creamy curve of Stella’s breast.

Soon the baby stopped sucking, her eyes closing. Karo showed her how to unlatch the small mouth without it hurting. Stella felt a flicker of disappointment when the warm, snuffling infant was removed and placed back in the cradle.

‘What do you want to call her?’ Esmie asked.

Stella had fleetingly thought of naming her daughter Myrtle, after her mother, but dismissed the idea at once. There must be no connection with her family at all.

‘You and Mr Lomax must decide,’ she said, forcing a smile.

Esmie seemed about to say something and then changed her mind. She nodded. ‘Karo will prepare a bath for you. Then you can sleep.’

Stella sank back in the bed and tried to stop the tears that were leaking between her closed eyelids. She was glad of the subdued light in the room, which hid her emotional state.

The Lomaxes decided to call the baby Isobel.

‘It’s after my Aunt Isobel in Scotland,’ Esmie explained. ‘I know she wasn’t my real aunt but she was a wonderful guardian after my parents died – and a great friend.’

Stella remembered Esmie being upset about the woman’s death five years ago.

‘My only regret in staying out east was that I never saw her again,’ Esmie said with emotion.

‘She was a wonderful woman,’ said Tom, ‘and a great doctor too.’ He gazed down at the baby in his arms. ‘If you have half of Isobel Carruthers’s spirit, my wee girl, you’ll take on the world.’

Esmie smiled. ‘Tom, we don’t want her to take on the world – just to thrive in it.’

Stella felt a pang at their happy talk, glad that the baby was already bringing them joy as well as a renewed tenderness towards each other. Where the upset over Andrew had put a strain on them for years, the two weeks that Isobel had been in their lives had lifted their jaded spirits.

Tom chuckled. ‘But Isobel sounds a bit serious for such a delicate creature, so we’ll probably call her Belle for short. What do you think?’

Stella’s eyes glistened. ‘I think that’s a lovely name.’

‘Belle it is, then,’ Tom declared, his lean face creasing in delight.

During the time that Stella was feeding the baby, she carried on living in the annex. Esmie stayed close to home too, making sure that both mother and baby were feeding and resting. Meanwhile Tom and Bijal began opening up the hotel for the new season, fixing up the gutters and repainting the verandas. They had a telephone installed – something Stella had been suggesting they do for years but Tom had resisted – as now they wanted Andrew to be able to contact them more easily.

As the spring came and wild flowers pushed up from the warming soil, Esmie and Tom would take Belle out in a makeshift pram – a box on wheels that Tom had made – and push her down the garden path and across the deserted golf course. It was too early for any visitors to the chalets or hotels, but Stella knew it was only a matter of time before word spread that there was a baby in the Lomax household up at the remote hotel.

Stella existed in a strange state of limbo – of living purely in the present. She focused on the job in hand: feeding Belle. She was glad they had chosen a name that would never have occurred to Stella; it made the baby seem less like hers. Her milk had come in strongly now, and the baby was thriving on it. Already Belle was changing shape, her crinkled face filling out into soft plump cheeks and her budlike mouth latching on eagerly to Stella’s breasts.

Most startling of all were her eyes: round dark-blue eyes that fixed on her trustingly. Eyes like sapphires: the one trait that betrayed that Hugh was the father.

Stella would stroke the baby’s soft brown hair as she fed and for a moment indulge in a fantasy of being Belle’s mother in a home that Hugh had created for them. It was the way it should have been – but now never would. Even if Hugh reappeared, Belle’s future had been determined. She would grow up as a Lomax.

One afternoon, while the Lomaxes were out with Belle, Stella was sewing on the veranda and heard the telephone ringing in the hotel. Bijal came