A Most Immoral Woman (5 page)

As the hotel
mafoo
saddled up two little Mongolian ponies, Mae pointed to the feisty chestnut. ‘I’ll have that one.’

The gelding’s ears lay flat against his head and his lips were tight; he regarded Mae’s approach with his head back and eyes rolling. When she tried to pat his neck, he jerked it away. Morrison signalled curtly to the
mafoo
to fetch a more tractable horse but Mae stopped him, insisting she liked that one. She calmed the pony with soft words and stroking until his ears rose to a happy angle and his lower lip loosened and trembled. Now, when she patted the white star on his forehead, he nuzzled her.

‘See? That wasn’t hard,’ she remarked and vaulted into the tall, wooden-framed saddle before either man could offer a hand, then settled her skirts over her legs.

Morrison marvelled that not even beasts were immune to her charms. He hoisted himself up onto the pony’s companion, a stocky bay, the
mafoo
slapped the horses’ flanks, and they were off, Mae in the lead.

As they cantered alongside the Wall towards the sea, Mae’s hair escaped its pins and streamed behind her. Snow flew from under the sure-footed ponies’ tough hooves.

Morrison’s spirits rose until he felt he had never been happier. With Mae’s scent still in his nostrils and her taste on his tongue, all of his frustrations with editors, the war, idiotic colleagues, missionaries, his health, ageing—everything melted into insignificance.
What jowls?
He almost laughed aloud at the memory of the previous morning’s perturbation.

Dismounting at Old Dragon Head, where the Great Wall jutted into the sea, they led their steaming ponies across the snow-crusted sand.

‘You ride well,’ Morrison said.

‘Back in Oakland, I had the dearest pony. He was a chestnut like this one, but with a white blaze and socks on all four legs. I rode him everywhere when I was young.’

‘You still are young.’

‘Not at twenty-six, not according to Mama, anyway. She worries that I will remain a spinster. So what if I do? It is most unfair. Men like you may remain bachelors without fear of censure. Why can’t women do the same?’

Morrison felt a rush of curiosity. For all the revelations of the night, he realised he knew next to nothing about her. ‘Have you ever been engaged?’

‘Three times.’

‘Three lucky men.’

‘One unlucky man three times.’

Morrison had so many questions it was hard to know where to begin. ‘The fellow you mentioned last night, the one I remind you of, was he your fiancé?’

‘No. That was a different one…Oh, Ernest, if you could see the expression on your face. It makes me want to kiss you again.’

A thick, tangy mist hung over the beach and the steely sea, laying a film on their hair and clothes and obscuring the ruined citadel at the Wall’s end. The sun’s first rays chiselled fine grooves in the fog and neat lines of waves licked at the beach’s edge. Gradually, the crumbling, cannonball-pocked enceintes and fortifications came into focus and, in the shallows, dark amorphous shapes solidified into volcanic boulders.

‘“To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, and tender curving lines of creamy spray,”’ Mae quoted dreamily.

‘Tennyson,
The Lotos-Eaters
. You recite beautifully.’

Mae smiled. ‘I wish Papa could hear that. He was always accusing me of neglecting my studies. He once wrote to Mama: “If I were the daughter of a senator, I should think much more about my education and manners than I did about dress! It is character and education that is the true standard of womanhood.” Oh, and that followed by three exclamation marks as usual.’ She peered at the surface of the Wall, probing one of a series of symmetrical hollows with her finger. ‘What happened to the Great Wall here? All these holes? I imagine some great battle between ancient warriors with shining helmets and bright silk banners of war.’

‘Actually it was the foreign troops who had come to relieve the Siege of Peking four years ago who did this.’

‘What a pity.’ She traced the rim of a bullet hole with one finger in a manner Morrison found most distracting. ‘Couldn’t they have rescued you all without damaging this beautiful old wall?’

‘As I said last night, sometimes there is adequate reason for military action. Had the Allied Forces not fought their way to the
capital, I might well and truly have merited my obituary, at least in the sense I would have been dead. By then, we had been holding out for fifty-five days. The booming of their guns, when they finally reached Peking, was as welcome as music.’

‘I am well pleased you are alive. On the other hand, I still don’t see why there was the need for so much destruction. I have heard there was a great deal of burning and looting by foreign troops and residents. It seems wanton.’

Morrison did not answer immediately, abashed and uncertain as to how much she knew. His part in the looting that followed the defeat of the Boxers was minor compared to some. He knew foreign diplomats who’d had to hire entire railway carriages to transport their bounty out to the ports. But he was not entirely blameless. There was that jade citron, encrusted with gold, taken from the Imperial Palace. And other things. Yet he considered it barely adequate reparation for his near-fatal wounding and the loss of his first home in Peking.

Something he had not thought about for a long time came back to him now as a painful memory. A fortnight after the foreign troops had swept in, Morrison had encountered a Chinese friend, a teacher. The man’s eyes were vacant. Russian soldiers had raped his moon-faced baby sister, sixteen years old, who wrote poetry and played the zither; they had battered and used her and left her for dead. Seven members of this friend’s family had swallowed lumps of raw opium and lain down side by side to die—their joint suicide a reproach to the perpetrators. It went unnoted. Morrison, appalled, had roundly slandered the Russians as an army and a race to his inconsolable friend. If British troops committed comparable crimes, he did not know about them—had not wanted to know.

Mae’s voice broke into his thoughts. ‘What are you thinking?’

He shook his head. ‘Just that they were…interesting times. But to return to your original point—if men destroy monuments from time to time, don’t forget it’s men who build them, as well.’

‘And the tears of one woman can bring them all down,’ Mae declared. ‘Yesterday, Mrs Ragsdale and I visited the Temple of the Virtuous Woman on Phoenix Mountain. Our native guide told us how Lady Meng-Chiang’s husband was abducted on their wedding night and dragged off to work on the Great Wall. When winter came and he still hadn’t returned, she took a bundle of warm clothing and went searching for him. By the time she found him, he was dead and his bones interred in the Wall itself. She wept until the skies darkened and the earth grew black and an eight-hundred-mile stretch of the Great Wall collapsed into rubble. Hearing of this, the Emperor ordered her killed. But when he laid eyes on her and saw how beautiful she was, he wanted her for a wife. She demanded that he give her first husband a proper burial first. As soon as he did, she jumped into the sea and drowned herself. Two stones rose from the waters, which you can still see today—her tombstone and her grave. Why are you smiling?’

‘They also say that Lady Meng-Chiang was born from a gourd, from which she sprung fully formed as a little girl. It’s just a native legend. Besides, in the end, although the Emperor did not get to have Lady Meng-Chiang for a wife, he did unify the country, standardise its system of writing and currency, and in many ways made it what it is today. And he rebuilt that section of the Wall’

‘That may be so. But all I could think was that Lady Meng-Chiang was young and beautiful and scarcely knew her husband when he was taken away. I certainly wouldn’t have thrown myself in the sea. Not for a man I hadn’t even slept with yet.’

‘And for one you had?’

‘Oh, honey. What a question.’

He went to embrace her but she seemed distracted. ‘I fear Mrs Ragsdale will soon be rising and calling me for breakfast. I probably should have left a note.’

‘And Dumas and I hold tickets for the morning train to Peking.’

‘I shall pine for you,’ Mae sighed. ‘Promise you will come to see me in Tientsin as soon as possible. Sooner, if you can. And promise that you will write. And that you will think of me often.’

‘I will, I will and I will,’ Morrison pledged.

‘And what did she promise you in return?’ Dumas asked as the train pulled away from Mountain-Sea Pass.

‘Nothing,’ Morrison replied. ‘It was implicit. A woman always has more cause to worry and thus to extract promises than a man does, in the beginning at least. Our attention is easily and quickly turned. Women, on the other hand, normally require a certain amount of time and structure to grow faithless. That is why the institution of marriage plays such a useful role in encouraging infidelity in the female.’

‘Ever the cynic.’

‘A romantic, actually. But I would classify my view of human nature as realistic rather than cynical.’ Morrison looked out the window for a moment. ‘I must admit, I am immensely taken with her. She is a gem, full of life and happiness.’

‘And with ten million gold dollars behind her.’

‘Now who is the cynic?’

‘Not me. Like you, I am merely a realist.’

Morrison rolled his eyes, more impressed with the notion of her wealth than he cared to let on. ‘Ah, good. Here is Kuan with our tea.’

The train, steaming away from the mountains, cut through a flat mosaic of fields. Snow was thinner on the ground here. Garlic shoots poked their jade heads up through the dusty soil. Wisps of smoke curled from farmhouse chimneys, ears of corn lay stacked in flat woven baskets on the roofs, and pale bundles of native cabbage peeped out from under the eaves. Despite the cold, the peasants were deep in industry. A man flicked a straw switch at the straining flanks of a donkey that was pulling a cart stacked three times its own height with cornstalks. Swinging heavy mallets, other men pounded stones quarried from the distant mountains into gravel. At the back of one house, a young girl hobbled on bound feet, scattering seeds amongst a clutch of hens.

Morrison found it hard to imagine that many miles west, across the Gulf of Bohai, war was being waged on land and sea. Or that he had spent such a night—and morning—of intimacy with one so enchanting.

‘Your Miss Perkins is certainly quite a specimen,’ Dumas remarked. ‘Her style and manner call to mind Alice Roosevelt, whose father once said that he could either be President of the United States or control Alice, but not both. It would not have surprised me in the least if, following Miss Roosevelt’s example, Miss Perkins had jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed or shot a pistol into the air to enliven the party, had there been a pool or pistol at hand, or a party for that matter.’

‘You seem obsessed with Miss Perkins,’ Morrison commented. ‘Perhaps it is you who ought to be having the affair.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Of course I don’t.’

‘
Buon giorno
!’ Guido Pardo, correspondent for
La Tribuna
, materialised in front of them, and with an embarrassment of Mediterranean enthusiasm, kissed them both on the cheek. He had just travelled from St Petersburg, where the Russians claimed they had already amassed one hundred thousand soldiers in the Manchurian city of Harbin, five hundred and forty miles northeast of Port Arthur. They were sending five thousand reinforcements to the war zone each day. Inclement weather, however, was creating difficulties: an entire engine had fallen through the ice.

‘Well, that at least is welcome news,’ said Morrison.

Pardo then gratified Morrison with further proof of the incompetence of his colleague-cum-nemesis Granger. In Newchang, Pardo said, he’d taken on Granger at billiards. Russian officers were playing at the next table. Granger, boasting of his fluency in Russian, eavesdropped on the Russians with droll diligence before turning to Pardo and whispering smugly, ‘Forty-five wounded.’

‘Which battle?’ Pardo asked, expressionless. Russian was his second language.

‘Not sure,’ Granger said, eyes darting about as though searching for the answer elsewhere in the room. ‘Latest one.’

‘I didn’t bother telling him that the Russians had been discussing the game’s score,’ Pardo told Morrison and Dumas. ‘
Buffone
!’

The three shared a hearty laugh at Granger’s expense.

Pardo’s company helped make the time fly until, at just past three in the afternoon, the massive walls of Peking appeared in the distance.

As the train pulled up alongside the entrance to the inner city at the ruins of the Ch’ien-men Gate, which had been chewed to rubble in the Boxer conflagrations, Morrison felt the medieval capital enclose him once more in its mighty grey-brick arms—oppressive, comforting, familiar, safe. Lonely.

Dumas would be staying the night at the British Legation before returning home to Tientsin. A carriage was waiting for him. Pardo was to rest with friends. The men parted warmly.

As Morrison and Kuan rattled through the familiar dusty streets on a hired cart, Morrison fell disconsolate. Mae had been to Peking and he hadn’t known. How that rankled him! He would have loved to have shown her the city, the site of so much history, his own as well as China’s. C.D. Jameson was an ass. Morrison was beyond certain that Jameson had never mentioned anything about an American heiress requesting his company at lunch; it was not the sort of invitation one overlooked or easily forgot.

Taking a deep breath, a prelude to a sigh, he inhaled dust and, feeling a sneeze coming on, dug his hands into his jacket pocket in search of his handkerchief. There he found something softer, fresher. He pulled out a lady’s lace-edged handkerchief. It was embroidered with the monogram ‘MRP’.

What a delightful thing for her to have done.
Completely forgetting he had to sneeze, Morrison pressed the delicate square of fabric to his face. Her perfume lingered on it like a last kiss.
That flashing-eyed maiden! Such a picture of loveliness!

The cart made its bone-jarring way north towards the Gate of Heavenly Peace, east past the walls of the palace, and north again up the Avenue of the Well of the Princely Mansions, a street so close to the Forbidden City that the palace walls cloaked it in shadow every sunset.

As they pulled up before the grey walls of his compound, formerly the residence of a Manchu prince, Morrison looked at it as if through Mae’s eyes. He pictured her exclaiming at the sight of the stone lion sentinels with their fierce expressions and proud chests, a carved ball under the paw of the male and a cub under that of the female. He imagined telling her how the people of Peking were able to tell a man’s status from the depth of his entryway as easily as they could read the position he held in court from the embroidered panel on his robe. A wealthy commoner might adorn his shallow entrance with murals and silk-fringed lanterns, but it would not fool anyone. His own entryway, Morrison would point out to the senator’s daughter, was impressively deep.

He was smiling to himself as, trailed by Kuan, he approached the great carved wall blocking the view to the inner courtyard—a ‘spirit screen’ intended to deflect evil spirits, which the Chinese believed could only travel in straight lines. Something occurred to him. He gestured at the screen. ‘Kuan, do you believe mischief only moves in straight lines? In my experience, mischief always surprises one by coming round the corner.’

Kuan considered this for a moment. ‘It is people who do not travel in straight lines,’ he replied with a little smile. ‘They can’t
help themselves. Always turning corners. Mischief just waiting for them there.’

‘Ha.’

In the immaculate courtyard behind the screen, the crab-apple tree was swollen with buds and, within the bamboo cage that hung from one of its branches, Cook’s Mongolian lark trilled. The spring festival had begun on the sixteenth of that month and everything still looked New Year’s-fresh, from the brightly painted latticework of the windows to the newly calligraphed couplets on either side of the doorways. Miniature mandarin trees in ceramic pots wafted a faint note of citrus into the air. From somewhere in the compound with its thirty-odd rooms drifted the uvular sounds of conversation in the Peking dialect. Morrison’s grey mare whinnied in her stable.

Morrison usually savoured that moment at the end of a trip when the sounds and smells of travel—the whistle and jolt of steam engines, the push and pong of crowds, the cries of coolies and the clip-clop of hooves—began to fade and the rhythms and sensations of home reasserted themselves in a bittersweet return to the familiar. This time, however, he felt as though a solemn grey curtain had fallen across a stage, and the gay and colourful world in which he’d been absorbed just over twenty-four hours earlier had evanesced, an artful illusion.

A slight and delicately featured girl stepped into the courtyard, carrying a stick broom. Although not more than sixteen, she wore her hair in the style of a married woman. At the sight of the men, she shrank back and, clutching the broom, stared at the ground.

Turning to Kuan, Morrison was surprised to see that his normally unflappable Boy had paled.

Before he could ask for an explanation, Kuan and the girl entered into low, urgent conversation, speaking too quickly for Morrison to understand. He gathered that they somehow knew each other and were shaken by the unexpected reunion.

‘Who is she, Kuan?’ Morrison asked when they had finished speaking.

‘She’s…’ Kuan seemed to be choosing his words with care. He glanced back at the girl, who had resumed sweeping with a concentration Morrison found strangely affecting, her feathery eyebrows drawn into a barely perceptible frown. ‘We were childhood friends. She’s Cook’s new wife.’

‘Truly?’ Morrison was surprised. He was fond of Cook, a taciturn old widower with a fanatical devotion to both the arts of the table and Morrison’s wellbeing. But Cook was not the most attractive of men. His narrow eyes looked as though they’d been carved out of the tough leather of his face by the thin blades that were his cheekbones. His nose was unusually flat for a northerner, his mouth wide and graceless. Cook was certainly no Kuan, whose large, intelligent eyes, brushstroke eyebrows, proud nose and well-proportioned mouth inspired appreciative comments from even some of the Western ladies of Morrison’s acquaintance. Morrison would not have expected Cook’s new wife to be such a slender young beauty as the one standing before them now. ‘Perhaps I’m wrong, but she doesn’t seem like she was brought up to be a servant,’ he observed.

Kuan straightened. ‘No one is brought up to be a servant. No one’s parents want this for their child. It is—how you say?—
circumstances
.’

Morrison realised his mistake. ‘Of course. What I meant was, what circumstances brought her to this place, I wonder?’

By now the pair was walking in the direction of Morrison’s library, a specially reconstructed wing on the southern side of the main courtyard.

Kuan gave Morrison a searching look. ‘I will tell you, but you cannot tell anyone else. Not even Cook.’

Morrison’s curiosity was piqued. ‘Go on.’

Kuan’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Her father was a follower of T’an Ssu-tung. You know?’

T’an had been one of the ‘Six Gentlemen’ whose ideas for reforming the Chinese system of government in order to strengthen China and bring it into the modern world had found a sympathetic hearing with the young Kuang Hsu Emperor six years earlier. The reformers argued that China needed to modernise everything, from the way farmers planted their fields to the manner in which the government managed its railways and trained its army. They spoke of women’s rights and of universal education. For one hundred heady days, the Emperor promulgated the reforms but his aunt, the Empress Dowager, and her conservative cronies in the court grew alarmed. The Empress Dowager arrested her nephew and had him locked up in a pavilion in the palace. Then she rounded up and executed the leading reformers, including T’an. A number of their supporters formed an underground anti-Ch’ing movement that blamed the Manchus for China’s woes and believed it was time for China to move, like Japan, to a constitutional monarchy or even a republic.

Morrison had been enthusiastic about the reform movement. He had once even offered to help one of the reformers, an offer that had been turned down, most unfortunately as it turned out, as two years later the man was put to death.

Morrison looked back with renewed interest at the girl
sweeping his courtyard. He noticed then that her feet, whilst small, had only been loosely bound. ‘I do indeed know who T’an was,’ he told Kuan, drawing a forefinger across his throat.

Kuan nodded, glancing nervously at the girl.

‘Her father—was he executed, too?’

‘He ran away. Then my parents died and I was taken to the orphanage. I never saw her again. She was young then.’ He looked pained. ‘Just a girl.’

‘She still looks young to me. What’s her name?’

‘Yu-ti.’

Morrison narrowed his eyes in thought. ‘Jade something?’

‘No. Not that
yu.
Means “waiting for little brother”. She was the second child, both girls. You know Chinese families must have boy.’

‘So they weren’t that progressive after all.’

‘This is China.’

‘It certainly is.’ They both watched as Yu-ti, having finished her sweeping, scampered back into the house. ‘What do you think of the reformers, Kuan?’

‘They are China’s hope,’ he replied fervently. ‘Unless we make our country strong, we will always be victims of foreign powers.’ As though catching himself saying something he should not, he bit his lip.

‘Do go on,’ Morrison urged. For all his complaints about Granger reporting the gossip of Chinese cart drivers, Morrison had always been professionally interested in the opinions of his Head Boy. But Kuan seemed reluctant to continue the conversation. That was fine, for Morrison had correspondence and other tasks waiting for him. He gave Kuan a few instructions, then stood alone in his courtyard, collecting his thoughts.

Two white kittens belonging to his servants came mewing and tumbling in together on the neat brick paving, the bells around their necks jingling. From his cage, Cook’s songbird observed their antics warily, cocking his head first in this direction, then that. Morrison felt for the handkerchief in his pocket and stroked it with his fingers. He took a deep breath, almost a sigh. Where was she now? he wondered. Was she thinking of him, too? His chest filled with longing.

Morrison’s library was narrow and high-ceilinged, a place of repose, order and scholarship. On the shelves, in addition to twenty thousand books in more than twenty languages, lay at least four hundred early manuscript dictionaries and grammars, four thousand pamphlets and two thousand maps and engravings, each one meticulously catalogued. Of all his collections, which included bibelots, silks and jade, Morrison cherished none as much as his books. He loved the written word for the way it secured thoughts and experiences, lending them structure, preventing them from passing out of sight and memory.

Morrison’s greatest regret was that for all his accomplishments, he was not, he knew, a great writer. He had published a book and a good many reports and telegrams. But when he thought of poets and writers he admired, he felt humble—and not many things humbled Morrison—for great authors, like Kipling, his favourite, gave moral sense to the world. It was not just facility with language or even a rich imagination, he knew, that made an author great, but the way the writer reached for and honoured the truth. Morrison freely confessed to the limitations of his own
craft; deep inside he knew that a worse problem was that in his public writing, at least, he was incapable of an unwavering allegiance to the truth. He could not deny to himself that how he understood the world did not always accord with the way he presented it to others. There was the odd doubt about an ally, which he thought unwise to voice, for example; information that for whatever reason he did not wish to share; strategic considerations; even, on occasion, necessary flattery.

Morrison confided only to his journal,
Lett’s No. 41 Indian and Colonial ROUGH DIARY Giving an Entire Page to a Day
, a serious, manly notebook, bound in leather and bearing advertisements for Remington typewriters and Whitfield’s Safes & Steel Doors on its inside covers, its pages faintly lined for convenience. Morrison had his eye on posterity, and to posterity he would be true. At the same time he would be loyal to the place that, for all his travels, he kept close to his heart: Australia. His journals would return there in the end, even if he did not. It was to his journal—and those who lived under the big, forgiving Australian sky—that he would confide his most awkward truths, the latest being that he was wildly infatuated with Miss Mae Ruth Perkins. His Maysie.
Maysie, Maysie
. But he would not dawdle now over sentimental matters. The unopened sack of mail on his worktable reproached him.

Morrison touched the precious handkerchief to his lips before folding it and replacing it in his pocket. Tipping the sack onto the table, he chose an envelope at random and sliced into it with his scrimshaw letter-opener. It was from J.O.P. Blunt,
The Times
correspondent in Shanghai. ‘What news from the City of Dreadful Dust?’ it began. Morrison could almost smell Blunt’s lavender pomade. Next was a note from some busybody in the Church,
harping that Morrison had still not reported on a modern college the missionaries had established somewhere or other. Morrison wrote himself a reminder to look into it. His old neighbour Prince Su, meanwhile, had sent a note addressed ‘My dear younger brother’; Morrison knew enough of Chinese ways to perceive both the endearment and the condescension in the address. There was a letter from Bangkok: ‘I hope you are happy,’ wrote his friend Eliza R. Scidmore of the National Geographic Society. ‘At last you have your war.’

As he sorted through the post, putting some letters on his desk to answer straight away and setting others aside, he stopped to dash off a line to Moberly Bell, pointedly noting to his editor how good it had been to be able to get out and see things for himself, and remarking, by the by, that his health had improved greatly since the outbreak of war.

Much to do.
He pulled on his sleeve guards and, seated at his desk, set up blotter and inkpot.

Dear Mae. Dearest Mae. Maysie. Mae, dear. Dearest.
After several false starts, his pen fairly flew down the sheet of paper, and the one after, and the one after that. He was just impressing his seal on the wax that fastened the envelope when a mighty sandstorm swooped upon the city. Howling winds rattled the windows and swirled yellow and orange dust through the air. Elsewhere in the compound he could hear doors slamming, flowerpots smashing and the cries of the servants as they rushed hither and thither securing the house. Morrison felt the excitement of the weather like a tremor throughout his body.
Maysie.