A Most Immoral Woman Read online

  The morning’s activities transpired as Morrison had predicted. By early afternoon, the correspondent, the military attaché and the servant stood on the platform at Newchang Station. Morrison’s nose burned with cold and his toes ached numbly inside his thick woollen socks and leather boots. The saturnine sky began to dissolve into snow just as a whistle announced the train’s arrival.

  The journey took most of the afternoon. The men read aloud from their notebooks: missionaries were withdrawing their womenfolk from the peninsula; Russian troops had threatened to torch an entire town if the Chinese army, which had arrived to protect the frightened residents, did not leave immediately; two hundred and ninety-eight mines set by Russians and Japanese to blow up one another’s armadas were adrift in open water, threatening shipping.

  ‘A stupid day,’ Morrison summed up, ‘spent in the accumulation of petty detail.’

  Dumas grimaced. ‘What will you focus on in your telegram?’

  ‘It hardly matters. Whatever I write, those peace lovers in Printing House Square will indubitably temper it before publication.’ Morrison knew that it was not just out of consideration for his health that Bell had given the task of reporting on the war to other correspondents. His editor was wary of his partisanship. Japan might be an ally of Britain, but Britain’s official stance was neutral and Bell was determined to see The Times’s coverage reflect that.

  By the time the train pulled into the old garrison town of Mountain-Sea Pass at the eastern terminus of the Great Wall, the men were fatigued into companionable silence and the sun had set on an undulating white landscape.

  Outside the station, a row of flickering lanterns indicated the presence of ricksha men. As the train disgorged its passengers, the runners jumped to their feet, shaking out their legs and shouting for custom. A Japanese invention, the ricksha had taken off in China where the press of more than four hundred million people in a parlous economy made men cheaper than horses. Now Kuan was trying to procure three of them for even less still.

  At last the three men were bouncing along on the thinly padded seats towards their hotel outside the walls of the Chinese town, rough blankets tucked around their knees for warmth. Morrison glanced over at his companions. The lanterns swinging at their feet illuminated their faces from below like characters from a ghost story and captured his runner’s breath as a long, thin cloud. The runners’ felt boots, bound with rope for traction, slapped the frozen ground. Icicles hung from the curlicue limbs of a scholar tree and a dog barked beside a gloomy farmhouse. Ahead, the full moon was rising over the crenellated parapets of the Great Wall. If Morrison were a different sort of person, he might have remarked that the night seemed full of poetry, mystery and magic. But his mind was filled with more prosaic thoughts of war, dinner and the prospect of a good night’s sleep.

  The runners came to a balletic halt on bent knees at the entrance to the Six Kingdoms Hotel, a neat, relatively new, twostorey brick building with a front veranda gaudily painted green, blue, red and gold in the Chinese style.

  Dumas raised one eyebrow as he surveyed the façade. ‘Like a marriage of military barracks and Chinese temple.’

  ‘What I like about it,’ said Morrison, clambering out of the ricksha, ‘is that the exterior exclaims, “You are in the Extreme Orient,” whilst the interior whispers, “You can still relax like a European.” And I, for one, am most assuredly looking forward to that.’

  Once they’d checked in, Morrison threw his swag on the bed and made a note of his reluctant tip to the hotel boy as well as the money spent on rickshas. (As the son of a Scottish schoolmaster who’d gone to the Antipodes after what he called ‘a run of bad luck in the mother country’, Morrison had inherited a seemingly unshakeable sense of financial insecurity and the habit of counting pennies.) He then quickly sponged off the dust of the journey and changed into fresh clothes. Collecting Dumas from his room, he strolled with him down to the modest dining room.

  As the maître d’ busied himself accommodating a large and fussy party of German engineers, Morrison looked around with mild curiosity and low expectations. The room hummed with polyglot conversation punctuated by the clink of silver on porcelain. A warm fug of wood fire with notes of roast meat and port filled his nostrils. At linen-covered tables set in the Western manner were seated missionaries, military attachés, railway men, traders in arms and supplies, dull men and their bony wives—the usual crowd, with one heart-stopping exception. Now here, Morrison thought, is excitement!

  Seated at one of the tables was a young woman of exceptional allure, whose eyes flashed with both mischief and promise, and whose style suggested that she had just stepped off Fifth Avenue or the Champs-Elysées, not some dusty street in north China. Morrison did not know enough of couture to recognise that her outfit was a confection of Worth’s of Paris. But it did not take a student of the fashion plate to observe how stylish were the lines of her dress, how rich were its fabrics and how eloquently they hugged her curvaceous body. Similarly, Morrison was mesmerised by the glitter and grace of her lively hands despite it being lost on him that her rings were fabricated by Lalique. She radiated sex and money. He was drawn, sailor to siren, moth to flame.

  Tearing his eyes off her, he turned to Dumas. ‘Who is this?’ he whispered, each syllable a compendium of wonder.

  Dumas stroked his moustache and bit his lip. ‘This,’ he stated, ‘is Trouble.’

  ‘I fear I am much drawn to Trouble.’

  ‘I think Trouble has noticed. She was just looking at you. Ah, she has looked away again. Perhaps Trouble is not drawn to you, after all.’

  ‘Trouble is always drawn to me. Women are another thing. Do you know her?’

  ‘Actually I do.’ Dumas’s answer was slow, cautious. ‘She stays in Tientsin.’

  ‘Tell me all.’

  ‘Her name is Miss Mae Ruth Perkins. She’s had all of Tientsin aflutter since her arrival some weeks ago. She is the daughter of the self-made millionaire, shipping magnate and US senator from California, George Clement Perkins, previously governor of that Wild Western State.’

  Millionaire? Senator? Be still my beating heart! ‘Pray tell, what is such a precious gem doing so far from its setting?’

  ‘One rumour is that she has come to China to escape scandal. Others say she has come to create it. The missionaries are hiding their daughters. Young Faith Biddle has reportedly already thrown over the Kingdom of God for the worship of Miss Perkins, causing her parents no end of consternation.’

  ‘Where does she stay?’

  ‘With the American consul.’

  ‘Ragsdale?’ Morrison made a face. ‘That’s like a brass mount for a diamond.’

  ‘Indeed. But I’m sure you’ve heard that as the publisher of the Sonoma County Daily Republican, Ragsdale obtained his post, and his escape from a howling pack of creditors stretching from Iowa to the west coast, thanks to a Party connection. That connection was apparently Miss Perkins’s father. And so Mrs Ragsdale has the interesting duty of acting as the young lady’s chaperone. That is her now at Miss Perkins’s table.’

  ‘So it is.’ Morrison had not registered Mrs Ragsdale’s presence. Although not quite fifty, Mrs Ragsdale had the unsexed appearance of a woman who had been married and thence neglected for a span of centuries. Whilst some women would have struggled against such a fate, Effie Ragsdale appeared to embrace it as Destiny.

  ‘Will you introduce me?’

  ‘To Mrs Ragsdale? With pleasure,’ Dumas replied dryly.

  At their approach, Miss Perkins looked up. ‘The famous Dr Morrison. We meet at last.’

  In Which Is Noted the Difficulty of Overheating

  a Room in North China in Winter

  Morrison was still fumbling for a reply to Miss Perkins’s greeting when Mrs Ragsdale, laying plump hand on ample bosom, effused in a voice notably less burdened by gravity than either her chin or chest that it was a great, no, the greatest, honour to encounter the esteemed Dr Morrison at such an outpost. Mor
rison, she informed Miss Perkins, was the most brilliant, the most famous, the most respectable of men. As she spoke, Mrs Ragsdale inflated with nervous excitement, as though with a noble gas. Morrison grew mildly concerned that she might burst.

  Mrs Ragsdale flapped on in this manner until Morrison, sinking into his boots, began to wish she really would burst. A vision from a London dinner party once held in his honour came suddenly into his head. His hosts had been so mindful of the esteem in which he was held that, as he later recorded in his journal: they seated me next to a grim old duchess long past the climacteric whilst a beautifully bosomed woman of lax morality languished at the other end of the table. Respectability was well and good, but it had its place. He would not have endured Mrs Ragsdale’s ballyhoo were it not for the ravishing creature with the chatoyant eyes seated at her side. ‘You are too kind,’ he insisted over and over, as if his words, stacked high enough, might dam the flow of her own.

  Finally Miss Perkins spoke up in a voice like warm chocolate. ‘I have heard much about you, Dr Morrison, even before tonight. You are a most celebrated man. Many have spoken to me of your great heroism four years ago during the Siege of Peking by the Boxer rebels. They say you rescued Mrs Squiers and Polly Condit Smith from the Western Hills and saved many hundreds of Christian converts when the Boxers laid siege to the cathedral. They say you were the bravest of all the men there.’

  ‘It’s true I did go to check on the American minister’s wife and her guest in the Western Hills. I was trying to figure out how to convey them, three children and some forty servants back to the city and into the Legation Quarter, or at least fortify the balcony of their holiday home, when Mr Squiers arrived with a Cossack loaned to him by the Russian minister. So I cannot take sole credit. Were we not between us heavily armed, I may not have accomplished my mission. As for the converts, had I abandoned them I’d have been ashamed to call myself a white man.’

  Miss Perkins’s eyes sparkled. Mrs Ragsdale clasped her hands to her breast. Her own husband had distinguished himself during the Boxers’ xenophobic and murderous rampage by writing a maudlin letter to the besieged in Peking telling them that he’d had a dream in which they’d all perished. The letter and Ragsdale himself were roundly maligned. News of a dispatch of US Marines was what they craved, not an outpouring of sentiment. Morrison had heard that Mrs Ragsdale was mortified when she learned that her husband had managed, once again, to become a laughingstock.

  ‘What an extraordinary experience it must have been,’ murmured Miss Perkins.

  ‘As we should probably only meet with one siege in a lifetime,’ Morrison replied, his eyes glued to her own, ‘it was just as well to have a good one whilst we were about it.’

  Miss Perkins laughed merrily. Mrs Ragsdale looked askance at her.

  ‘The Boxers were very fierce,’ reproved the older woman. ‘They killed many people. It was no joke at the time.’

  ‘True,’ Morrison said. ‘But they were little more than rabble, coolies and laundrymen. They’d been whipped into a frenzy by rumours that Christian missionaries were feeding on Chinese orphans’ blood and that the foreign churches had caused drought by bottling up the rain in the sky. Old Napoleon could have settled them before lunch with a whiff of grapeshot. It was the soldiers of the Imperial Court standing behind them who worried us more. You might say the Empress Dowager was the Boxers’ true leader. Which occasionally worked to our advantage.’

  ‘Really?’ Miss Perkins leaned forward and rested her chin on her hand in a most fetching manner. ‘How so?’

  ‘For instance, when they started shelling the cathedral, the Old Buddha—that’s what she’s called—was picnicking at the North Lake behind the Forbidden City, not far from there. The gunfire was giving her a headache. So she ordered a halt to the firing. As much as it proved her connection to the whole business, we were grateful for the respite. It gave us our chance to rescue the converts.’

  Miss Perkins shook her head. ‘How complex these politics are! It’s no wonder that all the world relies on your reports to understand the Chinese situation, Dr Morrison. I don’t know how many times I’ve said to my friends Mr Egan and Mr Holdsworth that if they failed to introduce us at the earliest possible opportunity I should be most horribly cross with them. Martin—Mr Egan—lent me the book you wrote about your overland journey from Shanghai to Burma. It was wonderful. So I feel like I know you already. I do admire your wit and courage. Not another man I have met here would undertake such a journey alone. And I’ve heard it was this book that led to The Times appointing you as their China correspondent.’

  Morrison felt a blush, that congenital curse of the fair-skinned, spread across his cheeks. He’d always envied the American readiness to catch a compliment and keep it. Personally, he was hardly averse to flattering remarks. But there was something deep in his Australian soul that caused him to squirm under their impact. Besides, to hear such blandishments coming from a mouth as kissable as Miss Perkins’s was disconcerting. It was he who ought to be complimenting her, but he couldn’t do so now without seeming reflexive or disingenuous.

  ‘And so it was,’ she continued, ‘that when I was in Peking a few weeks back, I asked Mr Jameson to invite you to a luncheon he hosted for me. I was crestfallen when you sent word that you could not attend.’ Her eyelashes batted a Morse code of disappointment.

  Morrison was filled with horror. C.D. Jameson, a tedious, rum-soaked old duffer and long-term resident of Peking who dabbled in commerce, mining and journalism, was forever inviting him around. Morrison routinely sent his regrets. He had a few more of those now. ‘If he had only informed me of your presence and told me of your request,’ he said, ‘I could hardly have refused.’

  ‘Mr Jameson assured me he told you.’ She widened her eyes.

  ‘I am so terribly sorry. I do not recall…’ That confirmed masturbator, Morrison thought, certain that Jameson had never mentioned anything about a Miss Perkins. But he knew that it wasn’t the time to go into Jameson’s perfidies, which were myriad.

  ‘Mr Jameson explained what a very busy man you are, Dr Morrison, so please don’t trouble yourself about it. Oh, goodness!’ A look of sweet concern came over her face. ‘You’ve gone quite red. Perhaps the dining room is a trifle overheated.’

  It was impossible to overheat any room in north China in winter. Morrison could feel the maddening blush spreading to his ears. He extracted his handkerchief from his pocket and patted his forehead.

  ‘Mae, dear,’ Mrs Ragsdale admonished, ‘Dr Morrison has more important things on his mind than meeting young ladies.’

  ‘No, no, not at all,’ Morrison rushed to say, plunging himself back into a sea of awkwardness.

  Mrs Ragsdale, oblivious to both his discomfort and the fact the conversation had moved forward, took up her panegyric afresh. ‘Mae, dear, you may not know this but when it was believed that Dr Morrison had died in the siege, The Times published a most beautiful obituary. A magnificent tribute.’ Her eyes misted over.

  ‘And what was even better, he was alive to enjoy it,’ Dumas chortled.

  Miss Perkins giggled. ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t recall the exact words,’ Morrison demurred. In truth, he could have recited then by heart. No newspaper…has ever had a more devoted, a more fearless, and a more able servant than Dr Morrison…he was characteristic of the best type of Colonial Englishman…‘It did rather distress my parents, and I understand the good citizens in my hometown of Geelong lowered their flags to half mast. But, just as your Mark Twain once more famously remarked, the report of my death had been greatly exaggerated. Like him, I am apparently still enjoying ruddy good health in the afterlife, if this be it.’

  Miss Perkins’s laughter was musical.

  Perhaps this is the afterlife. Heaven would have such angels.

  The maître d’, masking impatience under an equable smile, took advantage of the pause in conversation to inform the gentlemen that their table was ready.


  Reluctantly, Morrison followed Dumas and the maître d’ into what already felt like a kind of exile.

  He had only just taken his chair, however, when he jumped up again. He rushed back over to the ladies’ table and stammered out a suggestion that they all take coffee together in the drawing room after dinner.

  ‘That would be most agreeable,’ Miss Perkins said with the kind of smile that showed she saw straight through him.

  In Which the Number of Courses in a Western

  Meal Passes Without Remark and Miss Perkins

  Demonstrates One Way to Eat a Boiled Pheasant

  Once they had given their orders to the waiter, Dumas leaned in towards Morrison. ‘Eminently squeezable that one. And not a false tooth or clammy hand in sight.’

  ‘She thinks me self-important,’ Morrison replied gloomily. ‘And so I acted. I could kick myself for mentioning the flags of Geelong flying at half mast. All that Hero of the Siege business doesn’t help either. I might as well go a-courting with the medals I received from Queen Victoria.’

  ‘Young men woo with charm, energy and looks. Older ones woo with their wealth or, if that is lacking, their accomplishments.’

  ‘I don’t find that very reassuring.’

  Dumas shrugged. ‘I believe she likes you. Perhaps you have prospects for the Year of the Dragon after all.’