Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [187]
“Miss Annie telephoned ’bout half an hour ago,” she said as they walked into the house. They were followed by the houseboy, Fong Joe, carrying the luggage, and Lysandra’s amah, Ah Sing, in her black smock and trousers carrying her bedmat, her padded quilt, her tea kettle, and her incense sticks. These she would use to light the little shrine to the kitchen god, which she always placed by the stove, even though Hattie grumbled about it.
“She said you didn’t tell her you was comin’ out here, but she somehow guessed and she said to call her back right away.”
The lithe ginger cat, Mousie, was lying in the hall in a patch of sun and he waved his tail lazily at Francie as she passed by. An appetizing smell came from the kitchen. “Lysandra’s favorite,” Hattie explained, “honey-baked beans, fried chicken, and chocolate fudge pie.”
Francie laughed as she walked down the hall. She had come home and she felt better already. The door to her room stood wide, the windows were flung open to catch the warmth of the sun and it smelled of fresh air and lavender-polished wood. The old armoire in the corner held the few clothes she needed: her riding britches and cambric shirts, a few warm sweaters, a fringed suede cowboy jacket, and the long, flowing Chinese silk robes she liked to wear in the evening.
There was a pine dresser, a comfortable old chair, and a faded blue braid rug. The old carved oak bed that had been her mother’s was spread with a patchwork quilt stitched by Zocco’s wife twenty-five years ago. It had been her mother’s room, and her own son and daughter had been born there and every time she walked through its door it brought back memories. Some wonderful, some terrible. But that was the way her life had always been.
Buck woke late the morning after Harry’s dinner party. He glanced irritably at his watch. It was ten-thirty and he’d hardly slept, he’d tossed and turned, checking his watch every hour until five when at last his weary eyes had closed and he had dozed off. He had been thinking of Francie; he hadn’t seen her in over seven years, but he’d noticed the light in the windows of her house last night and had read the news of the Mandarin’s death in the papers. He knew how much she cared about him and he couldn’t get the thought of her, alone in her big house, out of his mind.
He thought of the years that had passed, Francie leading her own very private life and him leading his very public one. The truth was that he no longer had a private life. He and Maryanne kept up the pretense “for the children’s sake,” she’d told him earnestly, but the children were Brattles and cool as their mother. They went to the “right” schools and made the “right” friends and went to all the “right” parties, and they respected their father from a distance.
He wondered again why Maryanne had insisted they go to Harry’s dinner last night. “His name still counts for a lot in San Francisco,” she had replied imperturbably when he’d asked her. “He can still be a lot of help to you, Buck.”
“I can’t see exactly why I need Harry Harrison’s help,” he’d replied dryly.
She had patted her immaculate hair and said, “Just trust me, Buck. Don’t I always know best?” And she had smiled that cool superior Brattle smile that annoyed him so intensely.
He climbed tiredly out of bed. He called room service and asked them to send coffee and the morning papers, then he stepped into the shower and turned the water to cold. The icy jets snapped him awake and he toweled briskly dry, threw on the terrycloth robe and walked through to the sitting room just as the coffee arrived. He poured himself a cup and glanced at the Examiner, THE RICHEST LITTLE GIRL IN THE WORLD was the headline over the top of a photograph of a child in a summer-print dress:
“Seven-year-old Lysandra Lai Tsin inherits a million-dollar empire from the man she called her grandfather, the Mandarin Lai Tsin. Her famous mother is, of course, Francesca Harrison, whom the child resembles strongly.”
There was a lot more about