Excerpt
Fortune Is a Woman
CHAPTER 1
1937
Tuesday, October 3rd
Annie Aysgarth was a small, plump woman with large, expressive brown eyes, shiny conker-brown hair cut in a fashionable bob, and a permanent furrow between her brows. “Put there by years of worry” she always said. She was fifty-seven years old and had been Francie Harrison’s friend for almost thirty years, and she knew all there was to know about her.
Annie owned and ran the luxurious Aysgarth Arms Hotel on Union Square. She was as snappy as a Jack Russell terrier, as stubborn as a mule, and as soft-hearted as a chocolate cream. She was also president of Aysgarth Hotels International, a subsidiary of the Lai Tsin Corporation, with hotels in six countries. Annie Aysgarth had come a long way for a Yorkshire lass.
She walked briskly through the thickly carpeted corridors of her San Francisco hotel, looking in at the oak-paneled Dales Lounge to see that the fire was glowing in the huge Elizabethan stone fireplace, as it did every day, summer and winter alike, and that the waiters in scarlet hunt-jackets and breeches stood ready to fulfill the guests’ requests for brandy or coffee. She checked the malachite-and-chrome cocktail bar, nodding to the five busy barmen, pleased that, as usual, it was crowded with the city’s rich and glamorous young people. She then sauntered through the opulent, gilt-mirrored dining room, pausing here and there to exchange pleasantries with a regular diner or nod to a familiar face. She smiled as she overheard the familiar whispers that of course she must be the famous Annie Aysgarth, that this had been her first hotel and was her favorite. She was a damned fine-looking woman and worth millions, they said.
Her antennae were so tuned after all these years that she would have noticed a rug an inch out of place, an ashtray unemptied or a guest waiting too long for his order. She loved her hotel; she had practically built it with her own hands from ten rooms to two hundred. She knew every inch of the place and exactly how it worked, from the miles of electrical wiring to the intricacies of the steam-heating system. She could have told you exactly how many Irish linen sheets were in the linen rooms on each floor and how many pounds of prime Chicago beef the chef had ordered that week, how many room-service waiters were on duty that night and the names of the guests checking in or out tomorrow.
She had told the laundry workers in the basement exactly how much starch should be used on the pink damask tablecloths and she had been known to show the chambermaids how to properly clean a bathtub. She personally had decided the color schemes, fabrics, and furnishings for each of the twenty suites, and supervised the decoration of the entire hotel, choosing the English country-house look for the public rooms and the modern art deco green-and-silver mirrored decor for the cocktail bar. She always supervised the menus and the buying of the wines, and the coffee was specially blended to her taste. Nothing at the Aysgarth Arms was ever left to chance or in charge of a mere manager. Annie was a stickler for cleanliness and quality and she ran her smart hotel the same way she had run her father’s house in Yorkshire, all those wasted years.
Satisfied that everything was as it should be, she strolled back to the marble hallway and with a little gold key opened the door to the private golden bird-cage elevator that took her directly up to the penthouse. She sighed pleasurably as it whooshed silently upward, and wondered why people preached that it was wrong to enjoy luxury. The lift stopped, the door slid open, and she was in her own world. Dropping her velvet coat onto a chair she walked straight to the windows, as she always did.
The penthouse was twenty stories high, the floor-to-ceiling windows ran the full forty feet of her drawing room and the view over the nighttime city was magical. Traffic roared through the streets below, but up here all was silent and the city unrolled before her in a million sparkling points of light. She sighed with satisfaction, pleased that it still gave her the same thrill it had when she had first seen it, then turned and looked around her, smiling. She had wanted her home to be completely different from everything she had ever known, and therefore she had consulted a famous interior decorator.
The decorator was shrewd, talented, successful, thin, and ugly, and Annie was shrewd, talented, successful, and plumply pretty, and they had taken to each other immediately. “Look at me,” Annie had demanded, taking up a dramatic pose in the center of the huge, empty room. “You may be looking at a short, plump, brown-haired Yorkshirewoman of a certain age, but inside I’m tall and blond and glamorous. And ten years younger. That’s the woman I want you to design this apartment for.”
The decorator had laughed and said she knew exactly what Annie meant and then she had gone ahead and created a white and silver, silk and satin, lacquer and crystal apartment just like a Hollywood film set. The floors were laid with costly white marble and covered with velvety cream rugs, the enormous windows were hung with hundreds of yards of billowing cream silk taffeta, the walls were mirrored and lit with filigree silver sconces, the opulent sofas were white brocade, and there were little glass tables and alabaster, chrome, and crystal lamps with pleated silk shades. Annie’s huge bed was canopied in creamy satin and topped with a silver corona, and it looked, Annie said fondly, like a tart’s boudoir.
The chests and cabinets were lacquered white and dotted with the tall vases she kept filled with fresh long-stemmed white roses, whatever the season. The designer had told her she had used at least fifty different shades of white to create her effect, and the apartment cocooned Annie in a feeling of lightness and luxury and well-being, far away from the brown oilcloth and threadbare Turkish carpets of her youth. And she knew she would not have any of it if it were not for the Mandarin and Francie. And of course, Josh—who was the beginning of it all. It was all due to fate, or happenchance, as they would have called it in Yorkshire, and nothing seemed so far away as the place that had been her home for the first twenty-six years of her life.
But tonight her mind wasn’t on her past, nor the sumptuous decor and the sparkling nighttime view; it was on Francie. Picking up the copy of the San Francisco Chronicle she sank into a sofa, rereading the gossip column she had already read half a dozen times that day. It was headed DEATH OF THE MANDARIN, LAI TSIN.
The Mandarin Lai Tsin, a notoriously mysterious businessman, died yesterday at the estimated age of seventy, though no one knew his age for certain. He was said to have been born in a small village on the banks of the Yangtze River in China, and no one knows how he came to the United States, only that he arrived in San Francisco before the turn of the century and quickly made his first fortune as a merchant, using the old Chinese loan system of rotating credit.
But it was his scandalous liaison with Francesca Harrison, daughter of Nob Hill millionaire Harmon Harrison, the Yankee founder of one of our most important banks and top San Francisco socialite, that enabled the Mandarin to move into areas impenetrable to the Chinese in those early days. It was Francie Harrison who fronted all Lai Tsin’s business dealings here in the U.S. and also in Hong Kong, and it’s said by many that she was the guiding force that turned the Mandarin into a billionaire.
Lai Tsin was generous with his fortune, creating foundations to finance schools for Chinese children, endowing scholarships at the nation’s top colleges and universities, as well as building hospitals and orphanages. It was said that he was trying to make up for his own deprived childhood and lack of education. If so, then he did not succeed, for not one of the colleges he endowed ever gave him an honorary degree, and he was never a member of the board of any of his schools, orphanages, or hospitals.
The Mandarin was a private man whose life—apart from his very public liaison with his so-called concubine—remained a secret. But the biggest secret of all now is whether the ever-youthful and still beautiful Francesca Harrison will inherit his fortune—and how much it is worth.
San Francisco waits with bated breath to hear the latest episode in the saga of San Francisco’s most mysterious, most notorious, and richest man.
Annie wondered if Francie had read the piece, and how much the gossip still hurt her. Annie hadn’t attended the Mandarin’s funeral at sea, even though she had known and loved him as long as Francie; she had understood Francie was carrying out the old man’s last wishes and saying a special, private good-bye.
Impatiently throwing the newspaper to the floor, she picked up the phone, called reception and ordered her little dark-green Packard to be brought to the front. She threw the soft fur-collared velvet coat over her shoulders, stuffed the copy of the Chronicle into her pocket and took the elevator back down to the lobby.
She stopped in the lobby for a quick word with the duty manager. “Have Senator and Mrs. Wingate already left?” she asked casually, pulling on her gloves.
“Yes, ma’am, about a half hour ago.”
As she swept through the tall glass doors, she nodded good evening to the top-hatted doorman, then climbed behind the wheel of the little green Packard. She knew one thing for certain: she wasn’t going to mention to her friend Francie that Buck Wingate was in town with his wife, Maryanne, and that they were dining with Francie’s hated brother, Harry.
