Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [217]
“Old Mother” was the honorary term for an amah, but it also denoted the love Lysandra felt for her. Puzzled, she looked at her.
“What has come, Ah Sing?” she demanded, a touch impatiently; she was tired and had so many things on her mind.
“The letter you’ve been expecting all these months.” Ah Sing brought the postcard from her pocket at last and held it out to her. “There you see. It’s from him. Am I not right?”
Lysandra took the postcard with a trembling hand; it was from Australia, a beach somewhere near the Great Barrier Reef. There was just a thatched hut, a strip of golden sand, and a ripple of white surf on an azure sea. “The only thing missing is you” it said on the back.
Her heart jumped the way it had when she’d first met him and her legs threatened to give way. “He can’t mean it, Ah Sing,” she said quickly. “Can he seriously expect me to give up all this and go live on some desert island? Or at least this month it’s a desert island. Next month it might be Katmandu or New Guinea or Venezuela.”
Ah Sing put a gnarled hand on her shoulder and said quietly, “Your Old Mother is not wise enough to guide you in these things. All she knows is Number One daughter is not happy. And if all the money in the world cannot make Number One daughter a happy woman, something is wrong.”
Lysandra thought for a long time about what Ah Sing had said. She turned Matt’s postcard over and over in her hands, pressing it to her cheek, to her lips. She paced onto the verandah and stared down at the lights of Hong Kong. She thought of her mother and Buck and how happy they were. They had met Matt on their last visit six months ago. “He’s different,” Francie had said, smiling.
“Too different, perhaps,” Lysandra had replied.
He’d got on famously with her mother, and even Buck, who since Pierre had monitored her potential boyfriends with suspicious eyes, had said, “That’s an honest man, Lysandra, a rarity these days.”
Maybe too honest, she thought ruefully now. She realized her life was at a crossroads and she didn’t know which way to turn. Her thoughts turned to the Mandarin and the time he had brought her to Hong Kong when he had been an old man and she was just a child, and now she remembered what he had said about the “truths.”
“I shall not have the honor of knowing you on your long journey through life into womanhood,” he had told her. “I am giving you everything you could wish for on this earth—riches, power, and success—in the hope that your life will be blessed with happiness. I have told you everything, Lysandra, with the exception of one Truth. This Truth is my secret. This Truth is written down and locked away in my private safe in my office in Hong Kong. Only if despair overtakes you and your path in life seems unclear must you read it. And if that day should come, Granddaughter, then I pray you will forgive me and that my Truth will help you choose the right road to happiness.”
Lysandra ran from the verandah to her bedroom. She threw on a pair of jeans, a white cotton shirt, and tan cowboy boots. She snatched up her car keys and ran to the garage and drove her little sapphire-blue Mercedes 500 SEL convertible down the misty Peak roads, back to Central.
The night security man at the Lai Tsin building recognized her immediately and let her in, and she took the elevator to the thirtieth floor to her office. She took down the framed Chinese scroll hanging in front of her tiny private wall safe, quickly dialed the combination and removed the manila envelope she had transferred from the Mandarin’s old safe when the company had moved to its new building. Then with trembling hands she opened the letter he’d said she must never read unless she needed to know the truth. And sitting behind her own desk, the way he had as head of the great Lai Tsin hong, she read what the Mandarin had to say:
“To my granddaughter, Lysandra, my great-grandchildren, great-great grandchildren, and so on into infinity, the beloved ones, whom I shall