Fortune is a Woman (60 page)

"Do you really think so?" Lysandra asked tremulously.

"Damn right I do," Annie said, a smile spreading across her still-pretty face. "Now, let's have some more tea, shall we?"

But that conversation stayed a secret between Annie and Lysandra, and afterward, whenever any newcomer arrived in Hong Kong he was always told, "Better watch out for Lysandra Lai Tsin, she's inherited the old man's balls as well as his empire." And they would chuckle as they recounted the story of the schoolgirl taking on the Japanese general and causing him such a terrible loss of face.

Within four years, the Lai Tsin ships were sailing the world once again and the great company had retained its power. Lysandra fretted away her four years at Vassar, longing for Hong Kong. She knew her fate was different from that of the society girls she met. Oh, she wore the same pastel cashmere sweater sets, the pearls and the saddle shoes, but all they wanted was to meet Mr. Right and get married and have babies and she was Lysandra Lai Tsin, taipan of one of the richest companies in the world. She looked eagerly forward to facing her responsibilities. "It's sort of like you're Mr. Rockefeller," one of the girls told her wonderingly when she finally left Vassar for Hong Kong.

Francie and Buck flew over with her and the Chen family were at the airport to greet them.

"You never change, Philip," Francie said, hugging him. "You still look like the serious bespectacled young man who used to help Ollie with his homework."

"Would that the gods had been kinder and Ollie were still with us," he said gently. "But you, Francie, you are not a day older and even more beautiful."

She shook her head ruefully. "Even I can't ignore the white hairs, Philip."

"Wisdom arrives with the white hairs, and wisdom enhances beauty."

"Careful," Buck laughed. "I won't be able to keep up with all these Chinese compliments."

"It's true though." Lysandra looked admiringly at her mother, as slim and chic as she had been twenty years ago. Her full, cream silk shirt and little navy jacket showed off her still-small waist, and she wore a shady-brimmed navy straw hat with a silk gardenia pinned to one side. "Mom gets even prettier as she gets older."

"And so does Aunt Irene," she said, hugging the diminutive Chinese woman, equally smart in a red shantung shirt dress with the newly fashionable full skirt. "And no white hairs either," she added admiringly. Then she hugged her again, and said, "Oh, am I glad to see you."

Only Robert was different. He was standing back waiting for his elders to greet each other and Lysandra thought how grown-up he looked. "Robert," she said, hurrying over to him, both hands held out to take his. "You look..." She paused, assessing him while he smiled down at her. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his hornrimmed spectacles half-hid his blue eyes and he had the same thick shock of black hair. But there was something else about him and she hesitated, still searching for the right words. There was an air of confidence, as though he knew exactly where he was going in the world—but then he always had. "You look 'distinguished,' " she said with a grin, "like a famous neurosurgeon."

He laughed. "And you look exactly the same, only even skinnier."

"I am not," she cried indignantly. "I am fashionably slender." She laughed. "Dammit, you always knew how to get a rise out of me." She put her arms around him and hugged him. "Are we still friends?"

"Always," he promised. "You can count on me."

The taipan had come to claim her rightful heritage and there was a celebration party in the grand hall at the Lai Tsin headquarters that week. After the long formal dinner Francie watched her daughter proudly as she stood up to make her speech. She looked very young in a deep-blue cheongsam, but she spoke in flawless Mandarin, promising to guide the company as surely and firmly as her grandfather, telling them that she prayed one day she would be as wise as he, but that meanwhile she would need their help, and that the Lai Tsin hong would continue to be known for its fair and just business throughout the world.

"Oh, Buck," Francie whispered, clutching his hand with a pang of misgiving, "I only hope the Mandarin knew what he was doing. She's so young, shouldn't she be out enjoying herself like other girls her age?"

"Lysandra isn't 'other girls,' " he whispered back. "The Mandarin molded her when she was still just a kid. Plus she's got your backbone and determination and this is what she wants. And believe me, should the day ever come when she decides she doesn't want it, she'll be just as determined and sure of her decision."

"I hope you're right," Francie whispered.

A week later she and Buck returned to California. "I'll miss you," she told Lysandra as she said good-bye.

"Not half as much as I'll miss you," her daughter said, hugging her tightly, tears springing to her eyes. She watched as Buck and her mother climbed the steps to the plane, choking back the lump in her throat as Buck put his arm around Francie and they turned to wave to her. She thought how perfect they looked together, as though they belonged, and she was glad for their happiness. But as the plane disappeared into the clouds she knew her life was to be different from theirs. Her destiny was not as any man's wife, but as taipan of Lai Tsin.

She worked for a year at Philip Chen's side, learning all he could teach her. She took books home to study at night and worried about the time wasted attending weekend swimming parties at the country club or dancing with endless young men who always seemed so much younger and more carefree than she was, at parties at the Peninsula Hotel. Behind her pretty blond facade was a very serious young woman determined to live up to the demands of her inheritance, and nothing was going to stand in her way. And then, when she was just twenty-two, she met Pierre d'Arancourt.

He was forty and very distinguished-looking. His black hair had a silver streak at each temple, his nose was properly arrogant and his mouth sensual. He was lean and tall and his shoulders were broad, and he was different from any of the boys she had met. She first saw him riding in a visitors' race at the Happy Valley Racetrack.

"Who is he?" she asked, her eyes wide with interest, immediately placing fifty dollars on him to win.

"Oh, that's Prince Pierre," someone told her casually. "He shows up every now and then in Hong Kong when he's bored with Paris or New York or Buenos Aires. He's French, with an old title, but brought up mostly in Argentina—that's why he rides so well, I guess."

"I guess," she breathed, lifting her binoculars to watch as he rode to win.

He was at the dance given that night at the Government House and she noticed that he had noticed her watching him and she looked shyly away. In all her twenty-two years she had never had a boyfriend—oh, she'd been out on plenty of dates but she had never had a real boyfriend. She knew her mother worried about it, but Annie understood it was the wrong time in her life. She had to work hard and beat the game first, and though no one realized it, behind her cool facade she was an insecure young girl who knew nothing about love.

Pierre was so much older than she was, she didn't know exactly how to respond when he came over and introduced himself and asked her to dance. She thought that he was even handsomer than Buck, and she listened entranced to his tales of his ranch in Argentina and his apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris and the family château in the Loire. His life sounded cosmopolitan and glamorous, peppered with exotic names from the theater, movies, and society, and light years removed from her own cloistered, single-minded existence.

"And what do you do with yourself all day, out here in Hong Kong?" he asked, somehow managing to make it sound boringly provincial, and when she told him that she worked hard learning to run the company she had inherited from her grandfather, he laughed. His dark eyes were filled with mocking amusement at the idea as he said, "Well, maybe we should do something to change all that. You're far too beautiful to be wasted on mere business."

No one had ever called her beautiful before and Lysandra smiled breathlessly at him, saying nothing. She had been forced to leave him then and join her own party for supper, but she glanced his way often that night.

The next morning alongside her breakfast plate was a bouquet of tiny, perfect yellow rosebuds and a note, saying he hoped he would see her again. She put the flowers in water, remembering with a little frisson of excitement his dark eyes looking into hers and his deep voice telling her she was beautiful. Her head was in a whirl all day thinking of him, hoping he would call, but at six-thirty he still hadn't and she drove disappointedly home to her small apartment in the mid-levels. Ah Sing flung open the door, her face wreathed in smiles, and as she stepped inside, Lysandra saw the place was filled with flowers; roses and orchids, jasmine, peonies, and little tubs of creamy gardenias. The scent was overpowering and the message clear: Prince Pierre was very interested in her blond beauty and not her business brain.

The phone rang, and when she picked it up it was him. "Thank you for the flowers," she said breathlessly. "I've never seen so many in my life, you must have ransacked every florist in Hong Kong."

He laughed and asked her to dinner at the Peninsula Hotel and she caused raised eyebrows among the "colonials" in her sea-green brocade cheongsam and high-piled blond hair. "They forget my heritage is Chinese," she told Pierre, proudly. She wore one of his gardenias at her shoulder and he told her he would never smell its wonderful scent again without thinking of her. "Gardenias were made for you," he said as she smiled, excited to be in the company of the handsomest man in the room. When he took her home he kissed her hand on the doorstep and she watched as he strode back to his waiting car; he turned to wave and she kept the memory to dream about in bed that night.

The next evening when she returned from the office there was a small parcel wrapped in scarlet paper and tied with shiny ribbons waiting for her. She read her name, written in his own writing, and hefted the parcel excitedly from hand to hand wondering what it could be. Then she ripped it open and stared in delight at the exquisite little jade fan, carved so finely it resembled a piece of lace. But the card he had written enchanted her even more: "I found this on Hollywood Road. I thought of you in your Chinese cheongsam, and knew it belonged to you."

She called his number excitedly. "It's much too extravagant a present," she told him, laughing, "but I can't bear to give it back. I shall just have to buy you something in exchange."

"I never accept presents from women," he said, suddenly cold.

She replied, flustered, "Oh, I didn't mean anything wrong, I just—well, I guess I just wanted to make you as happy as you made me."

"That's all I ask in return," he said gallantly. "And one more thing—have supper again with me tonight."

Lysandra thought of the dinner she was supposed to attend that night and knew she would cancel it. He took her to a Chinese restaurant in Kowloon and she wore cool-blue linen and carried her exquisite jade fan, wafting it gently to and fro in the sultry air as he entertained her with stories of his family, who went back all the way
before
Louis, the Sun King, who was the only French king Lysandra knew much about.

She dined with him the next night and the next, and her pretty little apartment was filled with so many fresh flowers it was like an exotic garden. And each night he gave her a different gift: jade combs studded with pearls and yellow diamonds—"the color of your hair," he told her; a pair of gold-embroidered silk slippers with curled-up toes said to have belonged to the Dragon Empress Cixi that he "thought would appeal to her"; and last—because she forbade any more, a glorious jeweled egg, reputedly Fabergé, that he said he'd bought from an old Russian emigre eking out his last days on a pittance in a tiny apartment surrounded by czarist treasures.

Philip and Irene Chen soon heard of Lysandra's new suitor and the word about him was not good. "It's only a flirtation," Irene guessed worriedly, "but she's so young and inexperienced. I hope she doesn't do anything foolish." And she wished Robert were there to give her a friendly word of warning, but he was doing his internship in Georgetown.

Lysandra took Pierre to see her grandfather's old mansion on Repulse Bay, now a fabulous museum. She showed him the towering Lai Tsin building and her merchant ships in the harbor. And when he took her in his arms and kissed her and whispered words of passion in her ear, she eagerly agreed to marry him.

"Let's keep it to ourselves," he said jubilantly. "We'll throw a big party later in Paris for all my friends."

She thought guiltily of her mother, who would have so loved to be at her wedding, but Pierre's enthusiasm for his plan just swept her along and she was so much in love she thought only of him. The next day he chartered a yacht and they sailed to Macao, where Lysandra Lai Tsin became the bride of Prince Pierre d'Arancourt in a quick, very private ceremony in the lovely old Portuguese church. She wore a dress of red lace, the Chinese wedding color, and carried a bunch of scarlet roses, and she was so in love she forgot all about being the president of the Lai Tsin Corporation; all she wanted to be was Pierre's wife.

She sent a quick cable to Francie and Buck in San Francisco signing it "Princesse d'Arancourt," and they wired back their shock and demanded she bring her new husband home immediately to be inspected and approved. But Pierre wanted to go via Europe and they took the presidential suite on the first Messageries Maritime French liner bound for Marseilles.

Pierre was not a very tender and considerate lover, but Lysandra had no one to compare him to, and she just assumed his quick, take-it-or-leave-it attitude was normal. She didn't for a minute suspect he found her inexperience a nuisance and her youthful adoration boring. She was just so enamored she only saw how handsome and debonaire he was and noticed, jealously, how other women watched him with predatory eyes.

Pierre was not unfaithful to her until they reached Paris. He spent a lot of time on the phone in their suite at the George Cinq, where they were staying because his apartment on Avenue Foch was "being redecorated"—though anyway he said he planned to sell it and buy a larger one. He sent her alone to the couturiers to buy clothes. "You can't go on wearing those dreadful cheongsams," he told her disparagingly, and she gazed at him, hurt, remembering how he had liked them. She didn't know where he spent his afternoons and they seemed to dine early in their suite most nights and then he would leave her, telling her he had to visit his ailing grandmother, or that he was playing cards with his friends, or he had to travel to Deauville to sell the polo ponies he bred at the Argentine ranch.