Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [169]
Francie smiled at the girl and she ducked shyly out of sight again behind her loutish husband. Lai Tsin handed a small leather purse to Elder Brother, who bowed and quickly thanked him, his harsh expression changing to an oily smile again.
The villagers had gathered and stood watching at a respectful distance, but they shrank back as they turned and walked past them, some hiding their faces from Francie’s gaze, fearful that the Mandarin’s companion was a devil.
They walked together along the path that ran through the rice fields and the merry-eyed children came running, unafraid of the gwailo woman because she was with the Mandarin and he always gave them coins and small presents from his pockets.
Together they climbed the rocky path to Lilin’s ancestral hall and when they reached it Francie gasped in admiration. The vermillion walls shone like satin from the dozens of coats of paint carefully applied—coats of lacquer, each layer rubbed thin with glass paper before the next was applied, until it shone like the richest satin. The pierced carving was of the finest workmanship and the handmade tiles on the curved roof were an opalescent green. Inside the walls were inlaid with lacy patterns of mother-of-pearl and a marble slab inscribed in gold bore the names of Lilin and her two dead children.
Lai Tsin lit sticks of incense in the little bronze holders and kowtowed many times. Then he said to Francie, “I have brought you here because I can no longer live with the sins on my conscience. All I ask is your patience in listening to my story. I will tell you the two truths and then you may judge me as you wish.” He took a deep breath and said, “Let us sit together in my mother’s house, and I will tell you the deepest secrets of my soul.”
She looked again at the tablet on the wall that was all that remained of Lilin and her children, and at Lai Tsin’s gentle face and sad eyes and she said, “My dear friend, whatever is in your soul you may share it with me. Have no fear of my judgment, for who am I to judge others? And there is nothing you can say that would ever destroy our friendship and the love I have for you.”
“We shall see,” he said quietly.
The story was a long one and when he had finished there were tears in her eyes. Her heart ached for him and she put her arms around him in a loving embrace. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “Everything you have done was only for good. I am honored to have the friendship of such a person.”
They left the temple and walked back down the rocky path together, the dark, delicate Mandarin in his sumptuous robes and the tall, blond barbarian woman in her simple pleated blue skirt, back to the beautiful white steamship that would take them on the same journey Lai Tsin had taken all those years ago with Mayling, and which he would never take again.
CHAPTER 36
Francie sailed from Hong Kong for Europe the following week. She was to meet Annie in Paris, and then go in search of vines for the ranch. The British ship was filled with families returning on home-leave and the pallid hard-drinking men from the upriver rubber plantations in the jungles of Malaya who boarded at Singapore, and the sunburned tea-planters picked up at Colombo, as well as the usual sprinkling of foreign diplomats and businessmen.
As taipan of one of the richest hongs, Francie was seated at the captain’s table along with the most important passengers, and she played her role perfectly. Each night she dressed discreetly but beautifully in one of her Paris dresses. She put jeweled jade ornaments in her high-piled blond hair, wore her wonderful pearls and her delicious jasmine scent. She smiled at her fellow guests and she spoke charmingly to them when they spoke to her, but she