Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [72]
Annie’s jaw dropped in astonishment. She had never imagined the girl would want to stay with the Chinaman, but she surely admired her for it. She wished she had had as much spirit when she was eighteen and imagined how different her life might have been. She thought of her dreary routine, chained to Ivy Cottage, a slave to her father and quickly decided that she was never going back. Didn’t they say it was never too late to start over?
She said briskly, “Well, if that’s the case then I suppose I’d better just join you. Because I’m alone, too, now that Josh has gone. Oh yes, there’s our dad and my brothers back in Yorkshire, but they’ve outgrown me long ago. All I was was a workhorse, the maiden aunt with no bairns of her own to tend. I spent my life looking after our dad and now it’s somebody else’s turn.” She looked pleadingly at Francie. “Josh was like my own boy. I’ve got nothing left without him. At least here with you and the Chinaman and the Little Son there’d be a purpose to things. It’s thanks to poor Josh that I’m here. And here I want to stay. With you.”
Little Son suddenly ran toward her. He climbed onto her lap and she hugged him, smiling anxiously at them.
“Our home is the streets,” Francie warned her. “We have no money, we eat what the relief kitchens give us. You don’t know half my troubles, and you certainly don’t know Lai Tsin’s. He’s Chinese, he has no papers, he lives outside the law. I must stay with him and help him the way he helped me. Together we will cheat our fate.”
Annie nodded. They had each other, they didn’t need her. She stood up and forlornly dusted off her skirt. “Mebbe that’s what I’ve always wanted too,” she said, putting on her hat. “To cheat my fate.”
Her eyes met Francie’s and there was a flicker of recognition, as though they sensed each other’s bitter struggle to escape their pasts, and Francie smiled. “Then why don’t you stay?” she said.
CHAPTER 17
Lai Tsin stood at the back of a small room in a narrow little alley in Chinatown, watching the gambling. The mah-jongg tiles crackled like gunfire, the players shouted and screamed excitedly and the languorous, sickly sweet smell of opium stole from the curtained-off back room. The place was a ruin, the crumbling walls were shored up with beams and the ceiling was a dangerous spiderweb of cracks, but games of chance had been going on there for years and not even an earthquake could put Chinese off their gambling.
He fingered the money in his pocket, counting it mentally: there was the twenty dollars won from Chung Wu along with the worthless paper for the land in Hong Kong, and ten dollars left from the sum he had started out with, because it was his rule never to gamble down to his last cent, and almost five dollars in nickles and dimes scrimped and saved and stashed away in his straw pannier for a rainy day, which would have to be a monsoon because every day was a “rainy” one.
He stared at the men at the tables, despising them. They were gambling because they had the fever, not because they were clever like he was. His brain flew like a bird, chasing figures and permutations through his mind so fast, he could almost predict the outcome before it happened. The only trouble was the men he gambled with were as poor as he was, so he could never win enough money to join the really big games. It was, he thought sorrowfully, a case of the chicken or the egg. But tonight, because of the scarcity of gambling halls due to the earthquake, there were men playing he had only heard about, legendary gamblers whose skills were equal to his.
He thought of this thirty-five dollars and his new responsibilities. By rights, he should return to work in the fields, picking apples and plums or tending the crops, but that had barely fed him and certainly would not feed his new family. And he knew