Lies and Weddings(127)
Thomas sat down in a Gio Ponti armchair across from his daughter, not sure how to begin.
Eden broke the silence. “How are you?”
“I’ve been better. It’s been an intense few days.”
“I can’t even imagine. How was the wake for Luis Felipe?”
“Not many people came. A few lawyers, a couple of actresses, some art advisors. His Ferrari dealer was the only one who cried. We shipped his body back to Manila, where he’ll be buried in his father’s private mausoleum.”
“Even though he was so nasty to me the last time I saw him, I can’t help but feel enormously sad. He was far too young…”
“I know.” Thomas looked at his daughter, thinking how young and vulnerable she suddenly appeared. He could see the distress written all over her face, and as hard as it was going to be for him, he knew he needed to put a stop to it at once. “Eden, I’m sorry I’ve been unreachable until now, and that I’ve been so cryptic in my texts. I felt that it was important for us to talk about this in person. I don’t know what kind of documents Arabella showed you, but it must have all been rather confusing.”
Eden simply nodded. She was bursting with questions, but she wanted to give her father the chance to speak first.
“There’s so much I wish I could have told you sooner, but I was bound by promises that I made to your mother and to others. Funnily enough, I’ve now been freed from my burden of having to stay silent. So, yes, you asked me who Henry Tong was. Henry was my brother. He was younger by four years, and we looked nothing alike—Henry was a beautiful child who took after your grandmother’s side, and I was always the more studious one, while he was the rambunctious little rascal. I adored him, everyone did, and my parents spoiled him rotten. No one could say no to Henry—he was just one of those kids who had that ability to charm everyone. Henry grew up to be quite the ladies’ man. Actually, that’s an understatement. He had girls clamoring over him since he was in his early teens, and by sixteen he was sneaking around with much older women, the type that hung out at bars in Lan Kwai Fong. He had a different girlfriend in every district—in the Mid-Levels, there was Elaine; in North Point, there was Dora—you get the idea. As you know, my parents sent me to school in England, while Henry stayed in Hong Kong, so I only saw him on holidays, and I noticed year after year how much he was getting away with.”
“The same way Augie feels about Bea,” Eden remarked with a smirk.
“Not quite the same, I think. Henry and I were never very close; I was always rather vexed by how he treated my parents. He was always getting into trouble, and he ran laps around them with his antics. My father, being a cardiologist, did well, but his modest fortune was nothing compared to the truly rich in Hong Kong. Henry, who went to Diocesan, the top local private school, was palling around with the children of tycoons, and he needed to keep up. One year I returned to discover that they had bought him a Fiat sports car, but that wasn’t good enough for Henry. He totaled the Fiat on purpose and somehow managed to convince my mother to buy him a Porsche. My parents, meanwhile, drove a Honda, to give you an idea of how indulged he was. Of course eventually the chickens had to come back to roost…Henry developed a severe gambling problem. He and his high-roller pals had a private poker game every week. Sometimes he did well, other times he was losing by the thousands. My father would pay off his debts every time, so there was never any real consequence for Henry. Then he started going to Macau to gamble at the big casinos, and that’s when the real problems began. On one binge, he lost over a million dollars playing baccarat, and he had made the mistake of borrowing money from a triad leader. The interest payments ballooned to an ungodly sum as Henry kept dodging them until finally the triad got him one day, when he tried to slip into Macau again. They held him captive and threatened to cut out his tongue, so my father had no choice, he had to pay off the debt. But it was a big strain on his finances—I was about to start at Cambridge but my father could no longer afford to help me. Guess who stepped in? Lord Peregrine Gresham.”
“Lord Francis’s father?” Eden gasped in surprise.
“Yes, Francis of course knew of my troubles, and he told his father, who so kindly offered to help pay for my university.”
“How incredible. How did I never know this?”
“I never told anyone. And the old earl didn’t either. But you see now how indebted I was to the Greshams, and why I felt compelled to open my practice in Greshamsbury and help Francis when he in turn was in a bind. Anyway, Henry felt terrible about everything and swore he was done with gambling. For a while things settled down. He graduated from uni, got a job at Goldman Sachs, and rose through the ranks quickly. Of course once he had a taste of making real money, he fell back into his addiction. He was still running with the posh party crowd, but now he wanted to buy his own flat and impress all his girlfriends, so he began making secret trips to Macau again. From what I understand, one fateful day in 1995, luck blew his way and he won several million dollars over one weekend. He called his friends together to celebrate his good fortune at the bar atop the Peninsula. The drinks were flowing, everyone had too much. Henry, out of nowhere, decided to propose to Gabriella Soong, this beautiful heiress. What no one realized was that he had been having a secret affair for months with another girl in their circle—Mary Gao—and he had gotten her pregnant.”