Fortune is a Woman (61 page)

They had been at the George Cinq for two months when she found the note from his mistress in the pocket of his robe and even though it was written in French she knew enough to understand it was not a casual affair, it had been going on for years, and she gasped with shock when she saw her own name mentioned... "the rich Chinese concubine who is keeping you in the manner to which you have always aspired to become accustomed," it said. The scales of love fell from her eyes and she looked at the truth. She thought of her mother and the stories of how she had been "the Mandarin's concubine" and remembered how much they had hurt her, and anger flared in her blue eyes, turning them to steel.

There was a rap on the door and when she called "come in" she was surprised to see the manager. "Princesse, forgive my intrusion," he said, looking embarrassed, "but I think there must be some oversight on the Prince's part. It is the bill, madame, we have presented it several times and the Prince promises to pay, but so far"—he shrugged— "nothing. I myself have brought it to you, madame, in the hope that you might personally take care of this small matter to all our satisfaction."

Lysandra stared at him and her heart sank; it was all clear to her now. She thought of how Pierre had wooed her with his charming words and gifts and then she thought of the Mandarin and what he had said to her all those years ago in Hong Kong, when she was seven years old and his business acquaintances had showered her with a treasure trove of presents.

Remember,
he had said,
the gifts are not because these people are your friends, but because you are a Lai Tsin.

Pierre had not married her because he loved her; he had not married Lysandra. He had married the Lai Tsin fortune.

She signed the bill and the manager thanked her effusively, backing out of the salon and closing the door gently behind him, and a short while later a bottle of the best vintage champagne was delivered to her with his compliments and apologies for having disturbed her.

Lysandra wasted no time: she called the maid and instructed her to pack all her things. Then she took a pair of scissors and went through Pierre's closets systematically snipping his beautifully tailored jackets to shreds, leaving a jumbled heap of flannel pinstripes and chequered cashmere rags on the floor. Her bags were waiting and she put on her new blue Dior matching dress and coat and then she opened the bottle of champagne and drank a toast to the Mandarin, her grandfather, whose wise words would from now be indelibly printed on her brain and whose advice she would always follow. She emptied the rest of the champagne over Pierre's expensive silk ties and ordered her bags sent downstairs. Then she went to the airport and caught the next flight out to New York, and from there home to San Francisco, to cry on her mother's shoulder.

Gossip has a short fuse and the explosive story of how Prince Pierre had found his clothes snipped to shreds on the floor of a Paris hotel suite he had not even paid for, and that Lysandra had cut him off without a shilling, made its way back to Hong Kong before her. And it was added to the fund of Lysandra Lai Tsin stories that made up her legend by the time Matt Jarrad met her, thirteen years later.

***

The sun had completed its descent into the South China Sea and Lysandra turned from her office window with a sigh; Pierre was only an unpleasant memory now, she had divorced him quickly and her attorneys had crushed his attempts to claim part of the Lai Tsin fortune. It had been a nine-days' wonder in the international newspapers, nothing more, but it had left her wounded.

Robert Chen had returned to Hong Kong to work in the hospital there and now he headed up the neurological wing funded by Lai Tsin. He was her friend and confidant, and he, too, was married to his work, so they understood each other. She devoted her time to the company, only occasionally dating men whose backgrounds she knew and with whom she had business in common, but she never had allowed herself to fall in love again. Until Matt.

It was late. She turned from the window, picked up her purse from her desk and strode quickly to the door. She nodded good night to her secretary, who breathed a sigh of relief and picked up the phone to alert the waiting chauffeur that Madame was on her way down.

Lysandra stepped into the waiting dark-green Rolls, gazing blankly out the window at the crawling traffic as she headed homeward. "Home" was a sprawling, luxurious white "cottage," half-hidden behind hedges of oleanders and jacaranda on elegant Po Shan Road, and for a single brief year she had shared it with Matt, not caring what the taipans of Hong Kong or anyone else thought.

Matt was an adventurer, she'd known that when she'd met him. He was handsome and easy-going, an artist who traveled the world with a single ancient beat-up leather satchel containing his few shirts, an extra pair of jeans, and his precious paints and brushes.

She had met him at an exhibition of his paintings at a smart new gallery on Nathan Road. She and everyone else had been dressed to the nines in sequined chiffon and black tie, but the artist had turned up in faded jeans and a badly cut, collarless white shirt. He had a tall, rangy body, dark-red hair still wet from the shower and gray-green eyes that seemed to see right through her self-contained facade. His generous mouth turned up at the corners in a half-smile as he watched her sizing him up.

"Sorry about the shirt," he said. "When I saw how smart the gallery was and the words 'champagne and canapes' on the invitations, I dashed to the tailor around the corner and had him run up half a dozen of these in an hour." He grinned, his eyes lighting with delight. "I've been living in a hut on a beach in Bali for the past year; I guess I'm just not fit for society anymore. I've forgotten all the rules."

"You don't look like a man who obeys rules, anyway," she said.

Their eyes met for a long moment and then he said, "I guess you could say that's true."

She lingered longer than she normally would at such an affair and as the crowd thinned out he came to her and said, "Stay awhile. Have supper with me."

He looked searchingly at her and her heart jumped almost to her throat; she had never met anyone like this, a free spirit, a man who lived by his own rules.

She took him back to her lovely house on Po Shan Road and fed him scrambled eggs and champagne and when he touched her cheek and then kissed her she knew that what she was feeling was new. He asked her about her life and she told him about her family and then about Pierre. "I've never met a man yet who didn't think of my money as soon as he met me," she said challengingly.

He looked at her coolly and said, "Well, I guess you have now, Miss Moneybags. All I can think of is that your skin is like new cream and your eyes change color from aquamarine to sapphire in the candlelight, and that your hair should be tumbling down your back, not confined with jeweled combs. You're a pre-Raphaelite maiden and I don't want your money. All I want is to paint you."

She looked at him astonished. "You don't want to make love to me?"

He grinned and took her face between his hands. "That as well," he admitted.

That had been a year ago; a year of passionate lovemaking and passionate fights because she had kept her personal vow to devote her life to running the Lai Tsin Corporation, and maintained her strict business regime, leaving the house at seven-thirty each morning, often not returning until eight or nine at night. He would be there waiting for her, his lanky body propped against the verandah rail, a glass of whiskey in his hand, and champagne— her only drink—waiting in the silver bucket, beaded with icy drops. She had told herself sternly she wasn't going to give up
what
she was—
who
she was—for any man, and each night the distance seemed to grow between them.

"Drop it," he told her one night. "Let it all go, Lysandra. The company doesn't need you on a day-to-day basis, those guys could run it standing on their heads. Live your own life—be a woman for a change." He looked at her with those quiet, gray-green eyes and said, "Marry me, Lysandra."

She shrugged away his proposal, dwelling angrily on the fact that he thought the Lai Tsin Corporation could manage without her.
Her
—its dedicated taipan. He'd waited for her answer but she hadn't given him one and he turned away with a wry smile, and she thought nervously that his eyes looked sad.

He had left her just as easily as he'd met her. "Where are you going?" she'd asked, puzzled, as he'd flung his few possessions into the battered leather satchel.

"Away," he'd replied quietly.

"Away?" Her eyes were wide with the question.

"Away from you, my love," he'd said, with his endearing lopsided smile.

And then he'd slung his bag over his shoulder and with a final glance from those quiet gray-green eyes he'd turned and walked out of their bedroom, out of the beautiful white house on the smartest road on the Peak, and out of her life forever.

The Rolls turned into the driveway and she stepped quickly from it and into the house. She glanced as she always did at the verandah, half expecting to see him there waiting for her, but of course he wasn't, and she walked disconsolately through to her bedroom.
Their room,
as she always thought of it now, but without the clutter of his paints on the bathroom sink, and his watch—bought for a few dollars from a Cathay Road street vendor—lying on the bedside table, without his sweater tossed over the chair and his books on her shelves, the house felt like a silent tomb. No one would be coming, there was no need to dress, so she showered quickly and changed into a soft gray cashmere robe.

Ah Sing, who was really too old to look after her any longer but held an honorary position over the servants, came bustling into the room. Her face was as crumpled as a pickled walnut, her gray hair was scraped back from her wrinkled brow and she still insisted on wearing the traditional black smock and baggy pants of her profession. "It's come, Young Mistress," she said in Chinese, delving into the capacious pocket of her black smock. "Didn't your Old Mother tell you it would?"

"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 never see. This letter will come to you from beyond the grave, since my allotted time is long past. It is my ardent wish that it may never be read but if fate decrees it must, then so be it.