Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [84]
Lai Tsin walked slowly home and for once his mind was not on his business but on what he must do. Annie met him at the door. Her shirtsleeves were rolled up and the little room shone from polishing, but her brown eyes were very anxious. “She is awake,” she said agitatedly. “She took the potion and a little of the boiled ricewater. Then I talked to her about the baby. She cried on my shoulder, she was so relieved. Then I told her we must go away but she just shook her head and said she would never leave you.”
“I will speak with her.”
Francie was lying stiffly in the narrow bed, her hands clenched into tight fists. Her eyes were closed but her face was not peaceful; tension seemed to radiate from her.
“Sammy Morris will never harm you again. This, Lai Tsin promises you. Do you believe me, Francie?” She nodded slowly, but her eyes remained tightly shut.
He crouched by her side and took her hand. “It is time to leave, Little Sister,” he said. “Your life journey must continue without Lai Tsin. Like Little Son, Philip Chen, your child must be brought up among his own people, knowing their ways and understanding his heritage.” She lay stiff and silent, but he continued talking in a soft persuasive voice, explaining that she must put her child first, that Annie would help her, that he would look after them because they would always be his family. But she must go.
She held his hand to her face. “You are my friend,” she whispered. “I’ll never leave you.”
Their eyes met for a long moment and he said, “Then I must tell you a story so that you will understand your new responsibilities. Listen to me and you will know you have no choice.” She clung to his hand, gazing trustingly at him as he began the story that was engraved on his soul. “My sister, Mayling, and I were born into a world of poverty, the children of the concubine, Lilin. Our father, Ke Chungfen, was already an old man of sixty years, gray-haired and bent and cruel. His Number One wife had died after giving him five sons and he had married again quickly because more sons meant more comfort in his old age.
“His Number Two wife was young and pretty but she was also barren and lazy and he cursed the day he had married her. His house was dirty and it was said she smoked opium all day and took young lovers and made a fool of him, even though he beat her every night to teach her a lesson.
“He asked around the villages for a mui-tsai, a young girl whose family was willing to sell her into servitude. Lilin was thirteen years old and her family was so poor they were glad to let her go for the miserly sum of only forty yuan, just so they would not have to fill her rice bowl every night.
“She had a sweet oval face, long, shiny black hair to her waist, and big dark eyes. It was not long before the old man claimed more than he had paid for with his miserly forty yuan and young Lilin became his concubine. He treated her cruelly, beating her even though she worked hard to please him. She was forced to clean their poor rooms, to wash their clothes and prepare their food, and to wait on the wife and the arrogant young sons, who copied their father by berating her continually. And she would hang her head meekly and promise to try harder to please them, for she was only a paid-for mui-tsai and had no rights.”
Lai Tsin’s eyes met Francie’s as he said, “When Lilin knew she was to have a child she prayed it would be a son so he might have a better chance in life than she had, for even though the son of a mui-tsai would be considered the lowest of the low, he would never be as low as a girl. She worked even harder, staying up half the night to sew the little flat cotton shoes that the eldest son, a boy of thirteen, would sell in the marketplace. The father tended the big white ducks on the flat, reedy ponds belonging to the village lord, and the other sons worked picking mulberry leaves or in the rice fields, depending