Under Far Eastern Skies E-Book

Stefania Hartley

• Herausgeber: The Sicilian Mama
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Everyone thinks that thirty-one-year-old Shona Wells should get married: her overbearing father, her starry-eyed little sister, and the whole expat community in 1930s Singapore. But Shona wants independence and the freedom to choose her own way, to travel the world exploring nature.
The last thing twenty-eight-year-old Will Palmer needs is marriage. He’s too busy discovering new plant species in the remotest jungles in the world.
But then, three days before Shona is due to sail back to England, she meets Will, and finds someone with the same passion for the natural world. They are perfect for each other, until a series of misadventures and misunderstandings threatens to pull them apart forever.
Also available in paperback and Large Print paperback.

Leseprobe

Under Far Eastern Skies

Stefania Hartley

The Sicilian Mama

Copyright © 2024 Stefania Hartley

All rights reservedThe characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.First published by The People's Friend magazine as "Under Eastern Skies"ISBN-13: 978-1-914606-42-7Cover design by: Joseph Witchall

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Books By This Author

About The Author

Chapter 1

Singapore, 1930s

“Oh, Shona, don’t be such a killjoy,” her sister begged, fixing a stiff kiss curl on her cheek. “There will be RAF pilots, navy officers, planters…”

Shona put her Agatha Christie book down on the rattan table. “Lizbeth, we’re sailing back to England in a few days.” She had stopped calling England “home”.

Lizbeth turned away from the cheval mirror and frowned at her with kohl-rimmed eyes. “It doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy a little fun while we’re still here.”

“Of course we can, but you won’t have time to become acquainted with someone well enough for a long-distance relationship. Only to leave a little piece of your heart behind.”

Her sister pouted and pointed the curling iron at her. “I am not spending my last days in Singapore reading books in my room—and neither should you!” she declared.

Shona bristled. Wasn’t it enough to be bossed around by her parents that her younger sister should do it too?

“Please, Shona. If you don’t come, Maman won’t let me go!” Lizbeth let her arms flop by her sides like a sad dolly.

At twenty-two, Lizbeth was little older than a child. Shona could hardly remember what that age was like. All the excitement, energy and hopefulness had left her long ago. All she remembered from that time was the feeling of powerlessness.

Even now, at thirty-one, she didn’t have the independence and freedom she had imagined the years would earn her. Her sister, too, she knew, despite all her feisty energy, was as powerless as a goldfish in a bowl. And Shona had the power to take her out of that bowl for one night.

“All right, I’ll go. Just for you,” she replied, relenting.

“Thank you! I love you!”

Lizbeth leaped to hug her then returned to her curling iron and set her hair in perfect Marcel waves.

When they alighted from their taxi a short time later at the sailing club, the tropical night air was heavy with the scent of frangipani and jasmine. The notes of a gramophone drifted languidly from the veranda, mixed with the chatter of people and the clinking of glasses.

“That’s the song from the film ‘Oh, Sailor, Behave!’!” Lizbeth cried, bright-eyed and overly excited.

Perhaps it wasn’t sailors who were in danger of misbehaving that night.

She tugged at Shona’s arm. “Look, Danny is here and he’s with a pilot. Let’s go and talk to them.”

“You can go. I’ll find us a table.”

Before Shona had finished speaking, Lizbeth had already uncoupled their arms and was off to join the young planter and his friend.

Shona chose a table facing the sea. If the company bored her, as she suspected it would, she could enjoy the view of the South China Sea.

When Lizbeth and the two young men joined her, however, Shona found herself sitting inexplicably on the side facing the bar instead of the sea.

“Boy! Four stengahs here!” Danny called to the waiter.

Half whisky and half water, the stengah was Shona’s least favourite drink. Danny hadn’t even bothered asking. When the drinks arrived, she didn’t want to make trouble for the waiter and accepted her glass.

So here she was, at a party she hadn’t wished to attend, sitting on the side of the table she hadn’t wanted and sipping a drink she hadn’t ordered! Was there any single part of her life where other people didn’t do all the choosing for her?

Her father had denied her a formal education because he believed an educated woman intimidated potential suitors. Her mother kept choosing husbands for her despite Shona’s protests that she didn’t wish to get married.

Why should she wish to go from the yoke of her father’s authority to that of another man? Better to remain a spinster. It wasn’t by chance that Mary Anning and Jane Austen, both women who had achieved things, had been spinsters.

Every now and then, well-heeled “old maids” or widows stopped over in Singapore during their world tours and joined the local expat social life. Shona listened with enchantment to their stories. They made life without a man look extremely appealing. Of all the women she knew they were the only ones who seemed to be mistresses of their own destiny.

“Shona, Bertie is talking to you.” Her sister interrupted her reverie.

What had he said? Was she meant to reply?

“Forgive my sister, she often has her head in the clouds.” Lizbeth gave a chuckle, embarrassed. “And I don’t mean the kind of head in the cloud you pilots have!”

Bertie smiled smugly. “No, I would say that’s not the sort of head in the clouds that women usually have.”

Shona frowned. “Excuse me, I totally disagree. Amelia Earhart has just flown solo across the Atlantic!” she said.

“Earhart isn’t a girl, she’s a man,” Danny ruled with a dismissive flick of his hand.

“Why would you say that?” Shona fired back.

“Well, just look at her!”

“We are in the 1930s, in case you haven’t noticed. Do you always strip of feminine status any woman that threatens male supremacy in your field?”

Lizbeth kicked her sister under the table. Bertie didn’t even try to hide an eye roll and Danny snorted dismissively before moving the conversation to the upcoming air display.

Shona’s stomach roiled as Bertie joined in with tales of his deeds during the last flight display, generously peppered with what were obvious exaggerations.

How could her sister stomach these pompous stuffed shirts who thought so little of women? It must be pure insanity that moved women to relinquish control over their lives into the hands of men such as these.

She couldn’t bear Bertie’s monologue a moment longer.

“I’m going to visit the powder room,” she announced, standing up. The others didn’t protest.

Chapter 2

A covered walkway led out of the veranda towards the ladies’ powder room. On its right was a little garden of hibiscus, frangipani and cannas. To the left, the beach stretched to the water’s edge and boats rested upside down on the sand like enormous turtles. A waxing moon glittered on the calm waters.

Shona knew her sister was too enraptured by Danny to miss her, and the two men were too enraptured by themselves to miss anyone! She folded her frock behind her knees and sat down on the steps that led down to the beach.

Tree frogs and cicadas poured their hearts out in song. Shona opened her lungs to the cooler night air. Moonlight danced on the surface of the water, making the sea sparkle like a sequined dress.

She imagined slipping into one of the sailing boats moored to the jetty and sailing away. Shona loved sailing—the freedom and solitude; the exhilarating power of harnessing the wind in her hands and the boat’s obedience to the tiniest movements of the tiller in her grip. A sigh escaped her.

“It’s a beautiful night,” a deep baritone voice said behind her.

She turned slowly. A man in an evening suit stood behind her. He had deep blue eyes and an aquiline nose. A mane of blond curls gave him a somewhat leonine elegance.

“Yes. I was just admiring the view. What about you?”

He folded his long legs onto the steps and sat down next to her. Suddenly, the stairs felt a lot smaller.

“I could say the same but we both would know that it’s not entirely true. Admiring the view wasn’t the reason why we’ve left other people’s company, I’m sure.”

Shona was surprised. She was used to people saying platitudes they didn’t mean and expecting her to do the same back. Such honesty was refreshing and disarming, and he deserved the same.

“You’re correct. I was bored with the conversation. Allegedly I’m in the powder room right now. What about you?”

“I left because I was irritated.”

“May I ask who or what irritated you?”

“Men who boast about killing a tiger for a trophy. Who shoot an orangutan mother to take her infant as a pet yet still call themselves gentlemen!”

His body thrummed with such passion and energy that the air around him almost shimmered.

Who was he? He didn’t seem like any of the men Shona had met. There was something wild and untamed about him, yet gentlemanly all the same. The blond curls that grazed the back of his shirt’s collar and the white dinner jacket instead of a uniform suggested that he wasn’t in the Forces.

He couldn’t be in the civil services, like her father, or she would have met him before. He could be a banker or a trader. Judging by his rugged looks he was most likely a planter—or an adventurer. She was burning to ask him but didn’t.

“Killing such magnificent animals as tigers and orangutans is beyond my understanding. Even reptiles get my sympathy. I could never have a crocodile handbag or snakeskin shoes,” she confessed.

“Sadly not many people think this way.” He rested his elbows on his knees and looked to the horizon. “We keep felling the jungle to make way for more rubber plantations, granite quarries and tin mines but we still have only discovered and catalogued a tiny fraction of the species that live there. Some of the plants that will be extinct could have been medicinal or future crops. It will be too late if we don’t stop destroying the jungle at this rate.” His deep blue eyes darkened.

“I guess that you’re not a planter.”

“You guess correctly.” He smiled and a dimple formed on the side of his cheek.

“Nor are you a pilot, soldier or sailor.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?”

“You have a look about you.” Wild, unruly and exciting.

He chuckled. “That’s a very polite way to tell me that I need a haircut.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that. Your hair looks…fine.” “Fine” didn’t even begin to describe what she thought of his curls, nor how she longed to run her fingers through them. “What do you do here in Singapore?”

“I’m here to get supplies before returning to the jungle across the Strait in Malaya. I’m a botanist.”

“A botanist!”

She struggled to keep the awe out of her voice. If she had been allowed to enrol in university, botany would have been her chosen subject.

“It’s not as glamorous as it might sound. I live in a tin-roofed hut and my only company are monkeys.”

She imagined him swinging through the trees like Tarzan in the motion pictures. Warmth rose up her cheeks and she chased the thought away. “I’m sure it’s not a comfortable life but you are doing an important job.”

“I am. The jungle needs protecting and we won’t do that until we start caring about it. We can’t care about what we don’t know. My job is to find out what’s there and tell others. I believe that knowledge is the first step to love.”

The last word surprised her. Other than the vicar in his sermons, the men she knew didn’t ever talk about love. That word had never come out of her father’s lips and none of the men who had proposed to her over the years had mentioned love.

“You’re right, I believe,” she replied earnestly. “A very dear friend of mine, an amateur botanist, used to tell me the same thing. Unfortunately, she’s passed away.”

Chapter 3

Sadness swept over Shona as it did every time she thought of Georgina Hayes. Her friend had been exactly the kind of woman Shona wanted to be—a spinster who spent her life travelling, studying and discovering things.

“She left me a scrapbook of botanical drawings of the Amazon rainforest. As that’s a tropical jungle too, perhaps you might find the book useful. I couldn’t part with it but I could show it to you,” she said, immediately regretting it.

She was leaving soon and she had plenty of things to do in these last few days in Singapore. Meeting up with handsome strangers to show them a book wasn’t one of them. Besides, the book was already packed deep in her trunk.

“I’d like that very much,” he said with a smile that made her chest fizzle and crackle.

It was too late to backtrack; she had to honour her offer.

Inviting him to her home wasn’t a good idea. Her mother would immediately hear wedding bells. The sailing club was a much safer choice.

“Shall we meet here tomorrow morning at ten?”

“That would be smashing.” A lovely smile brought back his dimple and lingered in the crinkles around his eyes.

“Shona, here you are!” Lizbeth’s voice shook Shona back to attention.

She should be pleased that her sister had finally noticed her absence but she would much rather have continued chatting to the botanist than return to her table. She stood up and he did the same.

“It’s been a pleasure talking to you,” he told her. “I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

“Until tomorrow.”

As she walked back to the veranda with Lizbeth, Shona realised that they didn’t know each other’s names. Oh, well, if they missed each other tomorrow so be it. She had plenty of other things to worry about. Like how to stop her sister falling for a planter or a pilot whom she would never see again.

When they were about to reach the veranda, her sister leaned into her. “So you’ve met Will Palmer,” she whispered.

His name was Will Palmer, then.

“How do you know him?”

“Everyone does. Every girl, that is. Achingly handsome, clever, unattached… Unfortunately not marriage material. He lives in the jungle with the wild animals, as far from the world of marriage, babies and family Sunday roasts as a tiger might be from a teashop. He’s only twenty-five so he is unlikely to retire soon from that sort of life. You’d better look elsewhere, sister. I’m sorry.”

“I wasn’t—I didn’t! You know that I’m not interested in men and marriage,” Shona replied curtly.

“Maman and Papa are, on your behalf,” Lizbeth pointed out.

Shona rolled her eyes.

After the conversation with Will Palmer, Danny and Bertie’s company felt even duller than before. The only good thing, she reflected, was that now, from her seat facing the bar, she could keep an eye on the rest of the party.

She was hoping to catch another glimpse of the intriguing botanist but that night she didn’t see him again.

Chapter 4

He had been about to leave the club, fed up with the party once the conversation had fallen on the topic of hunting, and had decided to head home. Then, on his way out, he had met this girl and everything about the evening had changed.

What had struck Will about her, even before she turned her warm brown eyes in his direction, was that she was sitting on some scratchy, sandy steps in an evening frock.

Most of the ladies he knew cared about their clothes as passionately as he cared about his books. Either this young woman was different or she was in distress. In the first case, he was intrigued to know her. In the second, he was bound to offer help.

When she turned to him, her blissful expression told him that she wasn’t in distress but was merely enjoying the view, and he was hooked.

She had seemed intrigued by him as much as he was fascinated with her. He had wrongfooted her with his remark about needing a haircut—which was true but still not near the top of his priorities—and was sorry to have flustered her.

He wished they had had more time together or that, at least, he had had the presence of mind to ask her name. Luckily he was going to see her again tomorrow.

The taxi stopped in front of his friend’s bungalow far too soon. Will hadn’t yet had time to clear his head nor prepare answers to David’s inevitable questions about the party.

David and his wife, Catherine, had urged him to attend. They would be sad to hear that he hadn’t enjoyed the evening and had even fallen out with the hunters. The fact was that the only part of the evening he had enjoyed he was reluctant to share. David might not make too much of his meeting with the interesting young lady but Catherine needed no encouragement. She was always trying to match him with some eligible maiden.

Will opened the squeaky front door slowly and padded inside. Everyone had gone to bed. Good. He padded up the stairs to “his” bedroom, the guest room that David and Catherine always kept ready for him.

David and he were old friends but treated each other like brothers. Whenever Will missed the warmth of a family, David, Catherine and the children were there to welcome him with open arms. Because of this, every time he needed to pop over to Singapore to get supplies, their bungalow was his pied-à-terre. He kept his city clothes and his books in his room and, when he returned, everything was how he had left it. The whole family called it “Will’s room” and he had a feeling nobody was allowed to sleep there other than him.

When he joined the family for breakfast the next morning, David glanced up at him.

“How was the party?”

“A mixed bag. Overall it was not my cup of tea.”

“Of course it wasn’t. It would have been more like a glass of stengah but, then again, you don’t like whisky,” David teased.

“What didn’t you like about the party?” Catherine asked.

Will had noticed how, with men, you could get away with keeping a conversation superficial. Women often would sniff out your avoidance and dig deeper.