Fortune is a Woman (17 page)

They walked slowly up Stockton Street with the other Chinese refugees, hundreds of them fleeing the earthquake and the flames. Whole families walked together, the father at the head, his wife two steps behind and a stream of gaily clad children following in single file, each clutching the queue, or pigtail, of the child in front so they would not stray. Everyone carried or pushed or pulled something: prams and trunks crammed with ancestral scrolls and pictures, pots and dishes, bedding and bird cages, chairs and chests; they staggered under their heavy loads, hurrying to save what they could from the flames.

Lai Tsin paused at the top of the hill on the corner of California Street and looked back at what was left of San Francisco. A pall of gray smoke covered the city lit from beneath by a sinister orange glow. The fires had already devoured many of the important buildings, licking up masonry and marble as though it were wood and demolishing mere wood to instant ashes. Whole areas of the city were already gone and the firefighters were dynamiting buildings in the path of the flames in a desperate effort to save what was left. But by now the inferno had a life of its own, leaping easily across roofs and streets. The retail district had been devoured; the monumental Palace Hotel was a smoking ruin, as was most of Market Street and the areas around Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill, and now it had jumped Kearny Street into Chinatown. Aftershocks rippled the city, shaking nerves already stretched to the limit, but people were behaving in an orderly fashion, sitting stunned atop the hills, resignedly watching their homes burn.

After the first chaotic hour the citizens had thrown themselves into the dreadful task of digging out the wounded and the dead, but City Hospital had been destroyed and the other hospitals were badly damaged and no one could hold back the flames. It seemed to Lai Tsin that the very sky was on fire and he knew that by midnight Chinatown, too, would be just a heap of ashes.

His face was expressionless as he walked with the boy along California Street. Workers were hurriedly carrying treasures and paintings out of the old Mark Hopkins mansion, which had been donated by the millionaire's widow as an art school and gallery. It and the other big Nob Hill houses still stood intact, but the flames were spreading threateningly closer as the firemen battled with an uncertain water supply.

Unsure where to go, he sat on the steps of the mansion and took the tired little boy onto his knee. The child was poorly dressed, his little blue cotton smock was torn and his dark eyes darted about in terror. Lai Tsin gave him a rice cake to eat but there was nothing to drink and the child began to cry soundlessly as though he were too afraid to make any noise. Tears squeezed between his tightly shut eyelids and Lai Tsin held him close, patting his back soothingly. "It's all right, Little Son," he told him. "Do not cry for your mother and father. I will look after you."

After a while the child fell asleep, his thumb tucked securely into his mouth and his gay little cap with the multicolored ribbons askew. It was then that Lai Tsin noticed the girl.

Her face was as gray as the ashes and he could see a bandage beneath the shawl she wore wrapped around her head. She was dressed poorly in an old skirt and blouse and her bruised eyes looked haunted as she stared fixedly at the door of the grand mansion opposite.

Francie was unaware of Lai Tsin's eyes on her. She shrank back as a small dray drove swiftly up California Street and stopped outside the mansion, watching as the men leapt down and hurriedly removed a stretcher from the back of the cart, tucking the red blanket more securely over the body it contained before they lifted it and carried it up the steps.

Her eyes grew even wider as the door was flung open and she saw Harry standing there. His face was white and tense and his pale blue eyes were hard with anger.

She shrank quickly back into the shadows as she heard him say, "Bring my father in here, please," and the men obeyed. They placed the stretcher on the great oaken hall table and a few minutes later emerged from the house, pleased smiles on their faces as they pocketed their gold pieces.

The doors were wide open and Francie could see the staff gathered in the hall as Harry drew back the blanket and looked at his father lying broken and bloodied, his dead eyes still staring angrily at the world he could no longer see. Harry raised his eyes to the great stained-glass dome that glowed like a jewel in the light of the flames.

"You did this, Francesca," he cried savagely. "If he hadn't gone after you he would have been safe at home. You killed him just as surely as if you had taken a knife to him. And by God, I'll see you dead, if it's the last thing I do."

Standing in the shadows, Francie shivered. She knew Harry meant what he said and that his hatred was even more powerful than her father's. If Harry ever found her, he would keep his promise.

Lai Tsin saw the rich black chariot of the undertakers arrive and a silver-handled ebony coffin hurriedly carried in, and he stared puzzled at the young girl crouched in the shadows, watching. She seemed unaware of the rapidly approaching flames even though a great heat radiated from the streets below and the evil crackle foretold their doom. Even as he looked he saw a wisp of black smoke coming from the Hopkins mansion and then the sinister lick of yellow flame along the wooden fretwork edging the roof.

Gathering the sleeping boy to him he stood up, watching and waiting. Firemen were running urgently along the street, ordering everyone to leave. They knew they had no hope of saving the houses of the wealthy and their treasures.

Francie felt the heat of the fire on her skin, her eyes burned from the smoke, but she still could not leave. She watched and waited, mesmerized. A few moments later Harry opened the door. He ushered out a stream of frightened servants clutching their bags and baggage, watching as the grooms led away the terrified horses. Finally the butler walked back up the steps with half a dozen of the men and she moved closer, still in the shadows until she could see into the house that had been her home.

"Shall we carry the coffin out, sir?" the butler asked as the men respectfully held their caps.

Harry surveyed them from the top of the steps. He looked back at the silver-handled coffin lying on the massive oaken hall table and then he shook his head. He said bitterly, "This house was built as my father's home. It is a monument to a great man. And now it will be his tomb."

Francie shivered as the hot wind soughed along the street. The window of the Fairmont Hotel suddenly exploded and flames shot from the empty sockets.

With one last long look at his father's coffin Harry closed the door and turned the key. Francie's eyes followed him as he walked down the steps and along California Street, followed by his retainers.

Lai Tsin watched him go and then walked over to her. She was staring at the house as though waiting for something to happen. "Come with me," he said in English, but she did not even turn her head. Puzzled, he looked across at the house. The whole street was burning now and there was not much time left.

Francie sighed deeply as the roof began to smoke. There was a hiss and a quick jet of flame and suddenly it was afire.

She turned slowly and looked at the Chinaman.

"Look," she said in a voice like a sigh. "It's burning. That terrible house is dying. I swore I would see him in his grave. And now he is."

And then without another word she fell in step beside him and they walked together down the street, away from the flames and the heat and into the unknown night.

CHAPTER 13

It was a dark April morning and the gray clouds were so heavy with rain they were almost sitting on the roofs. Annie peered outside and thanked the Lord it was not Monday and a washday. Abandoning her plans to scrub the front steps, she slammed the door shut and contemplated what to do with the day.

The red Turkey-carpeted hallway was immaculate; the front-room, where no one ever sat except on high days and holidays, was dust-free; and the kitchen, where they spent all their time, gleamed from endless hours of blacking and polish. Upstairs was cleaned to within an inch of its life. There was not a speck of dirt or an unstarched shirt in the entire house. And it was Thursday, so tonight was shepherd's pie. Her father had always eaten the same meal on the same day each week, and Thursdays were always shepherd's pie.

A fire already burned brightly in the kitchen range and she lifted the kettle from the hob, took out the brown pot, spooned in some strong black tea and poured on the boiling water. Then she sank into her usual chair, waiting for the tea to brew.

It was early and her father was still in bed, the warm, shiny room that had been her world for the past ten years closed around her like a cosy trap. It looked the way it always had, the gleaming brass fender surrounding the dark-green tiled hearth, the wooden mantel with its red-velvet cover and the faded sepia family photos in silver frames, the circular brass vase holding the thin wooden spills her father used to light his pipe and the stuffed bird under the glass dome. She glanced around the room at the bronze gas jets with their fluted glass shades, at her father's favorite burgundy-velvet chair, sunken in the middle from years of sitting, and the embroidered white linen antimacassar over the back that she changed for a clean one each morning. She looked at the shiny brown linoleum and the big fringed rug, faded and worn over the years to a muted maroon, and at the pine table covered in red-checkered oilcloth where she baked and prepared their meals. And at the wheelback Windsor chairs they sat on to eat; at the deep pot sink with its gleaming brass taps, the dresser stacked with blue and white dishes, and hanging over her head, the wooden clothes rack with its rope and pulley where every day of her life freshly washed or ironed clothes hung to air in the warmth from the fire. The big sash window looked out onto a paved backyard surrounded by drooping rhododendron and laurel bushes, and come summer she would fix up a window box with a few colorful petunias and busy-lizzies.

Annie closed her eyes and sighed. She had no need to look, it was all indelibly imprinted on her brain, as were the ticking of the mahogany clock and its sweet Westminster chimes, the faint whistle of the kettle perpetually steaming on the hob ready to brew a pot of tea for the visitors who nowadays never came, the hiss of the gas jets, and the blustering roar of the coal fire that was lit every day of the year, regardless of summer's warmth, to heat the big oven.

In her mind she could hear the click of her own knitting needles and see her father puffing on his eternal pipe as they sat silent evening after silent evening with the heavy velvet curtains drawn and the long hours stretching interminably ahead till bedtime and dawn and another identical day.

She sighed. It had been over a year now that Josh had been gone and hardly a minute went by that she did not think of him. The only communication she had from him was a picture-postcard of a saloon on San Francisco's Barbary Coast. It had arrived five months ago, carefully concealed in a brown manila envelope and said simply, "I am all right, do not worry about me. I did not do those terrible things. Please believe me. Your loving brother." She had read it and reread it a thousand times. Josh had been the one who brought life to this house and she had lived vicariously through him. When he had gone she had grieved like a mother for a lost son and she had never, never, believed what they said about him. Though most everyone else did. His brothers were so shamed they rarely came around anymore even to see their dad, and their wives kept his grandchildren firmly away, unwilling to be tainted by Josh's wickedness. Though they were not afraid to be tainted by Frank Aysgarth's money. In fact, it had got so that every time she saw Bertie or Ted coming up the path she knew what it was they were after.

"The old man's gone soft in the head," Bertie had told her. "It's best for us to get the business away from him or it'll go right down the hill. He'll not make decisions one way or t'other, and how can we build houses if he won't say yea or nay?"

She knew he was right, but she also knew they were taking over Frank's finances. Still, there was nothing she could do about it and her dad simply did not care, so she just went on knitting endless little jackets and bonnets in the finest, softest angora wool for the steady procession of babies that filled her brothers' households. And no one ever so much as mentioned the name Josh Aysgarth out loud.

She jumped up as she heard her father's footsteps on the stairs, quickly stirring fresh creamy milk into a saucepan of porridge oats and adding a pinch of salt the way he liked it. She put it on the hob to simmer while she sliced up the crusty white loaf she had baked yesterday, setting the jar of strawberry jam and the morning paper next to his plate as she always did, though he had never glanced at another newspaper since those first terrible headlines about his son. But she still took the
Yorkshire Post
and read it herself later in the afternoon when she had finished her self-imposed chores.

"Morning, Dad," she called cheerily, pulling his chair out from the table and pouring his tea. "Your porridge'll be ready in a few minutes. How about a nice rasher or two this morning and maybe some scrambled eggs?"

He shook his grizzled head, sinking into the chair with a loud sigh. "Porridge will do," he said.

He stared silently at his plate and Annie sighed exasperatedly. How many times had she argued that he had two other sons, that he had grandchildren, that he had a business and money in the bank. That Josh was innocent. But to no avail. "When you have a lad who's done what our Josh has done, that's something God will never forgive. And nor will I," he had told her. And that was all he had ever said on the subject to this day.

But this morning was different. Frank pushed the newspaper to one side the way he always did, only this time something took his eye.

MASSIVE QUAKE DEMOLISHES SAN FRANCISCO, the headline blared. THOUSANDS FEARED DEAD IN RAGING INFERNO.

"I'll bet there's a few houses I helped build gone down in that," he commented, stirring strawberry jam into the steaming bowl of porridge.