to comfort me, I understand that. Please don’t think badly of me – I would never try to come between you and Felicity. You won’t mention it to anyone, will you?’
His blue eyes looked so sad that she could hardly bear to look at him. She had ruined something between them today and she feared it would never be quite the same again.
‘I won’t say anything,’ Andrew said, his expression tightening.
Stella kicked her pony into a trot and led the way back up the path, trying to keep down the sob that rose in her throat.
Chapter 54
New Delhi, October 1943
The relentless, energy-sapping heat and humidity of the monsoon season was abating and the temperature in the office was once again bearable under the ceiling fans. In the evenings, there was even a welcome breeze as Stella cycled home in the dark an hour after sundown.
There was a heightened atmosphere about the city. Earlier in the month, Lord Louis Mountbatten had arrived to take up his position as Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia – his brief to coordinate all three forces across the region. The organisation was soon known simply as SEAC and having it based in New Delhi seemed to have infused the officers and civil servants with a revived energy and sense of purpose.
Major Maclagan grew more optimistic. ‘With the good news about Italy siding with the Allies, it looks like the tide is turning in Europe,’ he said. ‘And we’re finally getting the reinforcements we need out here.’
Stella knew that his spirits were also buoyed up by relief that his family in Britain were safer, with the danger of invasion over and their chances of being bombed having lessened too.
New Delhi was full of military personnel – Indian, British, American and African – in transit to postings further east. They filled the canteens and the clubs and then moved on. When some of the other clerks at the YWCA asked Stella to join them at club dances, she declined, saying she was too tired or had letters to write. After a while, they stopped asking.
Major Maclagan drove himself as hard as ever and Stella was happy to work long hours too, for it took her mind off thinking about Belle growing up without her – and stopped her dwelling on her feelings for Andrew.
Yet when the night came and she had solitary hours in her room, she couldn’t prevent her thoughts turning to Andrew and their brief time together in the hills. Those days in Mussoorie and Chakrata when they had been constantly in each other’s company seemed dreamlike. She had never been so happy – and yet it had all changed after that fateful kiss at Tiger Fall.
Stella lingered over the details of her memory of what had happened – so brief and yet so intense and passionate. Who had instigated it? And who had drawn back first? She had never been sure. It was as if both of them had felt it the most natural gesture – that the pony trek and the swim had been leading up to such a moment. She was convinced she had seen the love in Andrew’s eyes – the same love that had stirred inside her.
Yet they had pulled apart almost as quickly as they’d come together, both taken by surprise at the ferocity of the kiss. Stella still blushed with shame at the thought of how she had so easily embraced another woman’s fiancé. For all that she loved Andrew, she should never have allowed it to happen.
Andrew obviously felt the same too. He had been silent on the ride back to the forest bungalow and had made sure that they were never alone again. Any subsequent conversation had been in the presence of either John or the major. The following morning, they had left the lush meadows around Chakrata and returned to Mussoorie. A day later, Andrew and John had departed on an early train south and she hadn’t seen him again.
Back in a sweltering Delhi, Stella had written to Andrew.
. . . I can’t say it enough, how sorry I am about the incident at the waterfall. It should never have happened. I feel it has spoilt things between us and that’s the last thing I want. I hope we can still stay friends. Once this war is over – and I believe one day we will win – you can return to Scotland and Felicity knowing that you did nothing wrong and that I