A Woman of Courage Read online

  A Woman of Courage

  J.H. FLETCHER

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  ALSO BY J.H. FLETCHER

  Dust of the Land

  The Governor’s House

  This is for Stefan Lang, with my affectionate admiration

  The secret of happiness is freedom.

  The secret of freedom is courage.

  Thucydides

  Courage is the key.

  Hilary Brand

  CONTENTS

  Also by J.H. Fletcher

  2004: The Boss

  Jennifer

  1968–91: Martin

  Sara

  Executioner Mode

  Temptation

  Defiance

  Family Get-Together

  1940–56: Beginnings

  In Care

  2004: Change of Course

  1956–58: Farm Girl

  Hunter Gatherer

  2004: Breaking Point

  Forward Into The Past

  1958–61: Runaway

  Pastures New

  2004: An Uncertain Future

  1961–65: Up the Ladder and Down the Snake

  2004: Betrayal

  Decision Time

  A Moment to Look Back

  1965–66: Moving Up

  Following the Highway

  1942–66: Haskins Gould

  New Ventures

  2004: A New Dawn

  Raiding Party

  1967: An End And A Beginning

  Moving On

  2004: Burglars Go to Gaol

  Angels of Retribution

  1970: The Island and The Jetty

  Roller Coaster

  2004: A Meeting With A Powerful Man

  1970–78: Addition to the Family

  1984–86: A Search for Roots

  Found Again, Lost Again

  1987–88: Cataclysm

  1988–89: House Amid The Coconuts

  Looking Lazy At The Sea

  1998: A New Horizon

  2000: A Door Into China

  2004: Hyena in Ambush

  A Business Opportunity

  Breaking the Walls

  In Limbo

  Terminus

  A New Life

  Coming Home

  Love Affair with A Deaf Man

  Together at Last

  Season’s Greetings from Haskins Gould

  Into the Hong

  Tsunami

  Cataclysm

  Dancing Inside His Head

  Payback Time

  Flight

  An End And A Beginning

  Onwards and Upwards

  Author’s Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  The Governor’s House

  2004

  THE BOSS

  Hilary Brand had slept for six hours and now, wearing a silk robe and with her hair tied back, was working at the little desk that was one of the built-in features of the cabin. Around her were the barely-audible noises of the corporate jet: the whisper of the air-conditioning, the hum of the twin engines propelling the Airbus south-east at eight hundred kilometres an hour, thirty thousand feet above the earth.

  It was Thursday 15 January 2004, five o’clock in the morning Singapore time, and Hilary was on her way home to Sydney after two productive weeks in Asia. She had held positive meetings in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur. Her address the previous Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of the founding of Singapore’s Management University had been praised by Prime Minister Goh himself.

  Singapore spelt business and, on this occasion, her address to the university, but she had other reasons for heading to Southeast Asia every year.

  Co-director Martha Tan had been born in Singapore thirty-two years before. Her grandfather was shot on Punggol Beach in 1942, one of seventy thousand Chinese civilians murdered by the Japanese 25th Army in the weeks after it occupied the island. Each year Hilary accompanied Martha to the memorial at the Hong Lim Centre in Chinatown, joining the young woman in paying her respects to the man they had never known.

  This pilgrimage was public knowledge, but there was another ritual she had been careful to keep to herself. Only she and Martha knew of the minor heart attack she had suffered four years before: if a heart attack could ever be called minor. By chance she had been in Singapore at the time and had been rushed to the nearby Mount Elizabeth Hospital. She had bounced back as she always did, discharging herself after two days against the advice of the doctors because she felt fine and was too busy to lounge about in a private ward doing nothing. Nevertheless she had been grateful for the hospital’s timely assistance and had made a huge donation to buy additional equipment for its coronary care unit.

  Ever since that episode she’d arranged an annual check-up at the same hospital. As Martha never failed to point out, she could have done it more simply in Sydney, but Hilary was having none of that.

  ‘They were in at the beginning,’ she said, repeating the joke she made every year. ‘Seems only fair they should be in at the death.’

  Death was not on her agenda but privacy was. ‘I am not Haskins Gould,’ she said. Once her greatest mate, Haskins had for years been her greatest enemy. ‘He loves the limelight. I don’t.’

  Maybe so but she was one of the most famous women in Australia; have a check-up in a Sydney hospital and the media would be on it in a flash. Next thing the world would be told she was dying; what that would do to the corporation’s share price she refused to contemplate.

  She had thought of the check-up as routine, no more significant than the work-out with which she started every morning – even on the Airbus she always managed a few bends and stretches in preparation for the excitement and challenges of the day ahead. Unfortunately Tuesday’s examination had proved less routine than she would have wished.

  The cardiologist had frowned over the test results. ‘Too much strain on the heart, Ms Brand. No need for surgery at present but it may become necessary if you don’t learn to take things easier.’

  Sagacious advice, no doubt, but her first reaction had been there was little she could do about it. ‘I have responsibilities,’ she said.

  ‘Indeed you do,’ he said. ‘And the first one should be to your health.’

  Not many people could put Hilary Brand in her place like Dr Chang. ‘I shall do what I can,’ she promised.

  ‘Be sure you mean it,’ he said. ‘We are not playing games here. If you don’t cut down I will not be responsible for the consequences.’

  He’d been right, of course. The occasional breathlessness; the dizzy spell she’d had in Jakarta… The episode had lasted no more than a second or two and she had brushed it aside, but Dr Chang had made it clear it would be asking for trouble to go on doing so. She sat, pen motionless in her hand, as she considered the implications of the cardiologist’s warning. So many things still to do… But: I will not be responsible for the consequences. Had the time come? The time she’d been promising herself for so many years? Was she ready? Was it even possible? The pressures on her seemed to grow more intense every day.

  She had two more reasons for returning to Southeast Asia every year, one official, one not. Officially she flew to Penang to spend time with the children in the home she helped finance. It was something she never failed to do and it gave her huge pleasure, but there was another reason for going and it was the most compelling of all. Even Martha knew nothing for certain about it. She might have guessed but Martha was as discreet as a clam.

  ‘I’m off, then,’ Hilary had said before leaving for the airport. It was something else she said every year. ‘Give you the chance to do some shopping. Catch up with your family. Go to Sentosa. I’ll see you in five days’ time.’

  Everyone des
erved a break, right? But this break was special. Dear Lord, so special.

  Penang, she thought now, as she thought so often. Eight hundred kilometres north of Singapore, off Malaysia’s west coast. Penang, the tropical island of the storybooks and Rumah Kelapa, the house amid the coconuts, with its flowerbeds brilliant with cannas and its views across the tropical sea… Penang, where my heart is.

  Had the time arrived for her to do something about it before it was too late? Or had her promises – not only to herself – been only words?

  She needed to make up her mind but not now. With Asia thousands of kilometres behind her, Hilary thrust Penang and Dr Chang’s warning firmly to the back of her mind and turned her attention, as always, to what lay ahead. The habit of a lifetime. Of a death time?

  Sydney was two hours distant; by the time they landed the local time would be ten o’clock in the morning. There would be the usual on-board customs and immigration clearance; the waiting chopper would lift her over the city’s snarled streets to the helipad atop her corporate headquarters and to the hundred and one challenges of her normal fifteen-hour day. And to a proper consideration of the choices with which she was now faced.

  At least this evening would be different. At eight-thirty her daughters Jennifer and Sara would be joining her for dinner at the Seven Stars Restaurant with its marvellous views across the harbour to the Opera House. Officially it would be a purely social occasion; in practice the meal would be a prelude to the real business, which would be conducted the next day in separate meetings with both of them.

  She had phoned them from Singapore. For Jennifer it would mean flying up from Melbourne, so of course she had whined about the inconvenience, as Hilary had known she would. She loved her daughters equally but their temperaments were very different and there were times, she couldn’t deny it, when Jennifer was a trial.

  ‘I’d been planning lunch with Tessa at Ricketts Point. I’ve booked a table…’

  Over the years Hilary had learnt how to handle Jennifer’s whines. ‘It’s just that Sara and I will be having dinner together and I thought it would be nice if you could join us. But if it’s inconvenient I shall quite understand.’

  ‘What’s it all about, anyway?’ Jennifer had always been hot on conspiracy theories, even before the phrase had been invented.

  ‘No special reason. I just thought it would be nice for the three of us to have a meal together. But if you can’t make it –’

  Jennifer would drink boiling oil before she missed out on a family reunion where important matters might be discussed. Hilary was sixty-three, after all, and would have to start planning the family’s future some time. There was no chance Jennifer would willingly miss out on a conversation like that although she still managed to get a moan out of it.

  ‘I suppose I can put Tessa off. Although I can’t imagine what Davis will say.’

  Hilary suspected her detestable son-in-law wouldn’t give a hoot where his wife was or what she was doing but that was hardly something she could say to Davis’s wife. ‘I’ll book you into the Amora,’ she said.

  By contrast Sara, three years younger than Jennifer in years, ten years older in maturity, had simply warned she might be a few minutes late. ‘By the time I get home and catch a shower…’

  ‘Take your time. We’ll have a drink while we’re waiting. Any other news?’

  ‘If you’re agreeable I thought I might have a word with Duncan Redgrave if I can get hold of him.’

  Duncan Redgrave was one of their top site engineers.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘This new Parramatta mall. The subbies have been telling me he’s always dreaming up some excuse to delay paying them.’

  ‘It’s his way of keeping the overdraft down. It means a saving on the interest.’

  ‘But they’ve got to have the cash to pay their workers. And we need to keep them sweet, Hilary.’

  ‘Have a word with him by all means. But the truth is he’ll try the same trick again the moment he thinks he can get away with it.’

  ‘We’ll just have to keep an eye on him,’ Sara said. People called thirty-three-year-old Sara Hilary’s clone: the same chestnut hair and green eyes, the same ferocious appetite for life. Now she laughed. ‘It’s blowing like hell up here.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On a steel girder thirty floors up.’

  Hilary shook her head, smiling to herself and at Sara, once again in what her mother called her truant-playing mode. Her real job was current affairs anchor with Channel 12 News, a station where she had worked for several years before Hilary had bought the company two years before. Hilary had other plans for Sara but in the meantime she was doing an excellent job, more thoughtful and less aggressive than many in her game. It was a style that might not suit Millie Dawlish, the executive producer Hilary had brought in three months before to raise the programme’s ratings, but that was all right too.

  Construction was a major part of the corporation’s business and construction was in Sara’s blood. She had no engineering qualifications but whenever she was free she liked to rush off to one or other of their current developments, doing her monkey act around the steel framework with a hundred metres of air beneath her feet, asking endless questions and learning, learning all the time. No other television station would have put up with it but Hilary had never played by the book and since she bought the station she had encouraged Sara’s independent ways: the more she knew about the various strands of the corporation’s business the more useful she would be down the track. There had been some rumbling from other members of the programme team but Hilary had ignored them.

  Sara wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, either. Thirty floors up… That would be right. The men loved her. Respected her too, which was probably more important. She would make a good CEO when she’d had a few more years experience and had learnt how to deal with ruffians like Haskins Gould, predators who would gulp her down bones and all given half a chance. For that she would need to spend more time in the boardroom and less balancing on steel girders, but that was a transition that so far Sara had been reluctant to make.

  Until her conversation with Dr Chang Hilary hadn’t cared, believing she had plenty of time to school Sara into what she saw as her future role in the group, but the cardiologist had made it plain that time was a luxury she no longer had.

  ‘The Seven Stars,’ Hilary had said. ‘Martha’s booked a table for eight-thirty tomorrow night. Be with us as soon as you can. And I want you to have breakfast with me at the lodge on Friday morning.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve got Millie’s early-morning conference call.’

  ‘Tell her you’ll be late.’

  ‘She won’t like it.’

  ‘She can take a hike. One more thing. If you do speak to Duncan Redgrave make sure he knows you have my backing. And don’t let him push you around.’

  ‘As if,’ Sara said.

  There would be just the three of them. They would eat and drink together as mother and daughters should but in their case seldom did. Jennifer would be petulant, suspecting plots, demanding to be told what was going on and unwilling to accept her assurance that nothing was going on at all; Sara would say nothing. Later they would go their several ways; Jennifer to her hotel, Sara to her terrace house in Paddington. Only then would Hilary’s chauffeured limousine take her home to Cadogan Lodge, the harbourside mansion on five acres of the most expensive real estate in Australia, and to the sleep that by then she would no doubt richly deserve.

  A tap on the cabin door and Martha came in with a tray bearing a silver pot and cream jug and two bone china cups and saucers. Martha had been a director of the company three years now, a trusted friend whom ten years before Hilary had recruited straight from the University of Singapore after Martha had graduated with a master’s degree in business management. Hilary had never regretted her choice. With the group’s involvement with Hong Kong growing by the day she’d had plans for Martha, too, but now that might n
o longer be her decision.

  ‘Coffee, Hilary.’

  Hilary Brand was the boss and nobody aboard the jet or anywhere else in her business empire was in any doubt about it, but she had never been one for surnames since her days in the Lady Northcote Farm School almost half a century before, when the staff had called her nothing else.

  ‘Brand, come here! Brand, if you don’t mend your ways it’s you for the fiery pit!’

  I’ll see you there, Mrs Wilmot. Although in those days she had been careful not to say it: the sharp edge of a ruler on your knuckles was a sure-fire lesson in how to hold your tongue.

  Those memories would remain with her forever but she had never used them as an excuse. The future was what mattered; only that.

  Martha placed the tray on the side table and poured. The fragrance of coffee filled the cabin. This was their normal routine when they were on the road: a ten-minute chat first thing every morning to discuss the agenda for the day.

  ‘We’ve radioed ahead,’ Martha said. ‘The helicopter will be waiting and the ground handler is on stand-by. There should be no delay.’ She spoke deferentially; co-director or not Martha was still in awe of Hilary Brand, a woman who had risen from dirt-poor beginnings to become a legend not only in Australia but in much of Asia too.

  They talked comfortably together, running through the appointments Hilary had scheduled for the day.

  ‘No trouble booking a table for tonight?’ Hilary said.

  Top restaurants in Sydney often required an advance booking, sometimes several weeks ahead, but for Hilary Brand a table would always be available.

  ‘None,’ Martha said.

  Hilary drained her second cup of coffee and stood, stretching the kinks out of her muscles. At a shade under five feet nine she was tall for a woman, whip lean and handsome, her chestnut hair without a hint of grey. Her silk robe had been presented to her by the wife of one of China’s top officials; it was emerald green to match her eyes and embroidered with a phoenix, the Chinese symbol of eternity, and she wore an emerald and diamond ring on her hand. She had celebrated her sixty-third birthday two weeks before but looked ten years younger.