Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [2]
Lysandra stared curiously at him: he was small and stockily built with strongly muscled arms and legs and he was dressed Western-style in cream twill shorts, a white shirt, and a gray blazer with a school crest on it. As the Mandarin turned away, the boy’s curious eyes, half-hidden behind round wire spectacles, met hers for a long moment. Then he bowed formally and turned to follow his father and the Mandarin to the door.
“I was hoping to entertain you at my home,” Philip said sadly, “but you are so tired.”
“To see you for these few moments was enough,” Lai Tsin replied as Philip’s head rested for a moment against his shoulder in a farewell embrace. “So that I could thank you for being my good son. And to ask you to guard the Lai Tsin family and their businesses the way you have always done, even though I will not be here.”
“You have my word, Honorable Father.” Philip stepped back, his face stern with the strain of holding back his emotion.
“Then I can die in peace,” the Mandarin replied quietly, and taking Lysandra’s hand he walked slowly to the waiting rickshaw.
As they rode down the narrow street he commanded her to look back at the old wooden godown. “We must never forget our humble beginnings,” he told her softly. “If we forget, we may believe we are too clever, or too rich, or too important. And that would bring bad joss, bad luck to the family.”
A small treasure trove of gifts from the Mandarin’s many business associates awaited Lysandra back at the mansion on Repulse Bay. As she opened the packages, exclaiming with delight over perfect pearl necklaces and exquisitely carved jade figurines, silken robes and painted fans, he cautioned her again. “Remember, the gifts are not because these people are your friends, but because you are a Lai Tsin.”
Many years later Lysandra had cause to remember his words.
At the end, when the Mandarin lay dying on a cool October day in San Francisco, only Francie, the beautiful Western woman known as his concubine, was allowed at his bedside. She bathed his fevered brow with cool cloths, held his hand and whispered words of comfort. He opened his eyes and gazed at her tenderly.
“You know what to do?” he whispered.
She nodded. “I know.”
A look of peace crossed his face and then he was gone.
The Mandarin Lai Tsin’s bones were not sent back to China to be buried with his ancestors, as was the custom. Instead, Francie hired a splendid white yacht, and decked it with festive red bunting, and, accompanied only by Lysandra and wearing beautiful white mourning clothes, she scattered his ashes far across San Francisco Bay.
It was what the Mandarin had wished.
Part I
FRANCIE
and
ANNIE
CHAPTER 1
1937
Tuesday, October 3rd
Annie Aysgarth was a small, plump woman with large, expressive brown eyes, shiny conker-brown hair cut in a fashionable bob, and a permanent furrow between her brows. “Put there by years of worry” she always said. She was fifty-seven years old and had been Francie Harrison’s friend for almost thirty years, and she knew all there was to know about her.
Annie owned and ran the luxurious Aysgarth Arms Hotel on Union Square. She was as snappy as a Jack Russell terrier, as stubborn as a mule, and as soft-hearted as a chocolate cream. She was also president of Aysgarth Hotels International, a subsidiary of the Lai Tsin Corporation, with hotels in six countries. Annie Aysgarth had come a long way for a Yorkshire lass.
She walked briskly through the thickly carpeted corridors of her San Francisco hotel, looking in at the oak-paneled Dales Lounge to see that the fire was glowing in the huge Elizabethan stone fireplace, as it did every day, summer and winter alike, and that the waiters in scarlet hunt-jackets and breeches stood ready to fulfill the guests’ requests for brandy or coffee. She checked the malachite-and-chrome cocktail bar, nodding to the five busy barmen, pleased that, as usual, it was crowded with the city’s rich and glamorous