Nick laughed. “Jacqueline, you sound like some character out of a Trollope novel!”

“Laugh all you want, but you’re being rather foolhardy about this. There is this sense of entitlement that was bred into you, and you are letting that affect your decisions. Do you really know what it means to be cut off from your fortune?”

“I’m doing just fine.”

Jacqueline gave Nick a patronizing smile. “I’m not talking about the twenty or thirty million your grandfather left you. That’s just teet toh lui.^*3 You can’t even buy a proper house in Singapore with that these days. I’m talking about your real legacy. Tyersall Park. Are you prepared to lose it?”

“Tyersall Park is going to be left to my father, and one day it will pass to me,” Nick said matter-of-factly.

“Let me give you some news—your father long ago gave up any hope of inheriting Tyersall Park.”

“That’s just idle gossip.”

“No it’s not, Nicky. It’s a fact, and aside from your grandmother’s lawyers and your great-uncle Alfred, I am probably the only person on the planet who knows this.”

Nicky shook his head in disbelief.

Jacqueline sighed. “You think you know everything. Do you know I was with your grandmother the day your father announced that he was going to immigrate to Australia? No, because you were away at boarding school during that time. Your grandmother was furious at your father, and then she was brokenhearted. Imagine, a woman of her generation, a widow, having to suffer the indignity of this. I remember she cried to me, ‘What’s the use of having this house and all these things, when my only son is abandoning me?’ That’s when she decided to change her will and leave the house to you. She skipped over your father and put all her hopes in you.”

Nick couldn’t mask his look of surprise. For years, his busybody relatives had engaged in covert speculation over the contents of his grandmother’s will, but this was one twist he hadn’t imagined.

“Of course, your recent actions have sabotaged those plans. I have it on good authority that your grandmother is preparing to change her will again. How will you feel if Tyersall Park goes to one of your cousins?”

“If Astrid gets it, I’d be happy for her.”

“You know how your grandmother is—she will want the house to go to one of the boys. It won’t go to any of the Leongs, because she knows that they already have too many properties, but it could very well go to one of your Thai cousins. Or one of the Chengs. How would you feel if Eddie Cheng became lord and master of Tyersall Park?”

Nick looked at Jacqueline in alarm.

Jacqueline paused for a moment, carefully considering what she wanted to say next. “Do you know anything about my family, Nicky?”

“What do you mean? I know your grandfather was Ling Yin Chao.”

“In the 1900s my grandfather was the richest man in Southeast Asia, revered by all. His house on Mount Sophia was bigger than Tyersall Park, and I was born in that house. I grew up much like your family did, in a kind of luxury that hardly exists today.”