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. Morrison, 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.