Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [126]
Many times he had contemplated suicide. It would have been so easy to leave his pain behind, to smoke a pipe of opium and then jump into the harbor and let the tide take him, or to climb the bamboo scaffolding surrounding the tall buildings under construction and throw himself off, or to buy a lethal potion from the Chinese medicine shops where they knew all about those things. But in the end, he could never do it. Because one ambition still burned in his shattered, broken shell of a body. He wanted to take his revenge on Francesca Harrison. He wanted her to suffer the way Josh had suffered and the way he was suffering now. She had put him through six years of hell when she had him flung, half-dead, into the China clipper, never expecting him to return. Her big mistake had been in not killing him and shipping him instead to China. It had taken years for him to make his way to Hong Kong. And now fate had given her to him again.
She looked so cool and elegant and aloof, like a queen surveying her subjects, he thought bitterly, his heart jumping with the old excitement. Ignoring the angry shouts of the overseer, he moved from shadow to shadow in their wake. He watched as they climbed into the waiting rickshaw, and as they set off down the street he padded after them, trotting in rhythm with the rickshaw man, but always keeping a careful distance behind.
Despite his crippled back and his terrible wounds, years of work as a coolie had toughened him and he was scarcely out of breath when they turned into Pedder Street. He lingered on the edge of the milling crowds, watching as she stepped from the rickshaw and went into the hotel.
He was very thoughtful as he made his way back to his miserable little rat-infested cubicle later. He bought a bowl of rice and vegetables from a stand on the corner and ate it leaning against a wall, still thinking. And when he went back to his stinking cubicle and lit a pipe of opium, he thanked whatever providence had thrown her into his path. He decided that whatever it took this time he would get Miss Francesca Harrison. He would torture her the way he had been tortured, and then he would be merciful. He would kill her.
Francie had been in Hong Kong a month and at first everything had seemed to be going right. They had found a cargo ship for sale; it was shabby and rusty and not very fast, but it was sound. The purchase was completed within days, an American captain was appointed and a Chinese crew recruited. Now it lay in anchor, empty and waiting for its first cargo. And that was the problem.
The crumbs of business that Lai Tsin had anticipated snatching from the rich hongs’ tables had not materialized. They did not do business with Chinese, they told him loftily. And when Francie went to see the taipans, they closed their doors to her, instructing their compradors, the managers, to offer her a glass of sherry and a sweet biscuit and inform her they did not do business with women. Smarting, she had retorted that it was their loss and marched out, but the truth was that now she did not know what to do.
It seemed impossible to penetrate their tight trading cartel, it was all wrapped up and shared out amongst the big hongs, the Jardines, the Swires, and the others.
The rickety godown had been cleaned and swept ready for the bales of silk and cotton, the chests of tea and spices, the precious carpets and the porcelain and jade they’d anticipated shipping, but it was still