Sarah had fought a long and very painful battle with her conscience, but in the end she’d known she’d have to end things with Delaney if she was ever to have peace of mind. She must trust that Philip would survive the Japanese occupation, and fulfil her promise to him, regardless of the cost to her own happiness.

She determinedly blocked her thoughts of Delaney, for they stirred up too many agonising emotions, and focused instead on the memories of the isolated rubber plantation her father had managed for Philip Tarrant’s wealthy family in Malaya. She and Jane had been raised in the large, tin-roofed wooden bungalow that jutted from the hillside on stilts above the canopy of trees. Even now, she could almost feel the heat and humidity of that fateful tropical night when she’d stood on the wrap-round veranda and peered through the sturdy mosquito screens to the black stillness of the mountains and the jungle that sprawled over them to the very edges of the plantation.

The Malay servants had lit the oil lamps and the orange flames had flickered in the breeze that still carried the vestiges of the day’s heat in its dank, musty breath, the smell almost smothering the delicate scents of the orchids, jasmine and frangipani that grew in wild abandon amid the trees. She remembered how the moths had battered against the screens as mosquitoes whined, and tiny pinpricks of light from the fireflies had blinked in the darkness as the deep bass hooting of macaque monkeys echoed into the night. The war in Europe had seemed to be a world away – the threat of invasion by the Japanese merely rumours stoked by scaremongers who refused to believe that Singapore was a fortress and impregnable.

Now Sarah gave a deep sigh and watched the last of the dying sun spark fire in the solitaire diamond ring she’d taken to wearing again as a reminder of where her loyalties lay. She’d been nineteen and Philip twenty-four when she’d accepted his proposal that night, and he’d slipped this ring on her finger.

In hindsight, Sarah could see now that she had been naively caught up in the heady flush of first love; overwhelmed that such a handsome, wealthy man wanted her as his wife when he was regarded as a real catch by the gossiping, catty cliques of women who had daughters to marry off. She had felt that as the daughter of what was seen as a lowly plantation manager, she’d won an enormous victory over those cats, and with her parents’ approval, their future together had seemed set to follow the customary privileged and pampered lifestyle of all the ex-pats who lived and worked in the Far East. She’d gone to bed that night to fantasize about her wedding day and the eventual move into the gracious white mansion that had been in the Tarrant family for four generations.

But her dreams had been cruelly shattered by the news that the Japanese had landed on the beaches of north-eastern Malaya, and just before dawn she’d stood with her heavily pregnant mother and younger sister on the veranda to watch the Japanese bombers on their way to attacking the airfields in Singapore.