Rugged up in scarves, hats and furs, the ladies’ gloved hands tucked into rabbit-fur muffs, the party set off down a road leading eastwards from the hotel towards the Wall. It was a short stroll, only a quarter of a mile. Kuan and Mrs Ragsdale’s Boy, Ah Long, summoned from the conviviality of the servants’ quarters, walked ahead, dangling paper lanterns from sticks. Animated by a sense of shared adventure, they tramped through the soft white landscape towards the ancient battlements, their boots crunching through the snow, their noses shocked crimson by the cold. Morrison stole a sideways look at Mae and felt his blood thrill.
The Great Wall divided the world between known and unknown, domestic and wild, civilised and barbarian. It was less a coherent wall than a confusion of fortifications scattered across the north of China like a game of pick-up sticks across a carpet. It hadn’t served any real function since 1644. That year, the Ming General Wu San-kui opened the gates at Mountain-Sea Pass to a powerful army led by Manchus, the very people this section of the Wall had been designed to keep out. General Wu had asked the Manchus to help quell a rebellion against the Ming Dynasty. He hadn’t foreseen that, having done so, they would enthrone their own dynasty, the Ch’ing. Once thrown open, gates in even the most carefully defended walls could be difficult to close. Morrison, relating this history to Mae and Mrs Ragsdale, never considered there might be a lesson there for himself.
Upon arriving at the Wall, Mrs Ragsdale panted and patted her chest. ‘I fear I am not up for such a climb. You young folks go on ahead.’
‘I shall keep Mrs Ragsdale company,’ offered the faithful Dumas.
‘You want me to come?’ Kuan asked Morrison, looking unsurprised by the answer.
Morrison clasped Mae’s small gloved hand as they negotiated the stone steps, slippery with snow. When the heel of her boot caught in a crack and she stumbled, he caught and held her for a moment, his heart banging in his chest like a schoolboy’s.
Atop the summit, they surveyed the glittering landscape. The full moon had sown the snowy fields with diamonds and silvered the rippling corrugations of the Gulf of Bohai where, not far from where they stood, the Wall finished its discontinuous journey of thousands of miles, abutting into the sea.
The path along the Great Wall became less treacherous as they approached the old garrison town of Mountain-Sea Pass, nestled against the magnificent watchtower of the First Pass Under Heaven. The snowfall had laid an ermine stole over the Wall’s towers and parapets and the undulating roofs of the town dwellings. Below, on deserted streets ragged with moonshadow, a nightwatchman, plump in padded robes, swung his painted lantern, calling out the Hour of the Rat and, in a gesture as self-defeating as it was traditional, banging together wooden clappers to warn thieves of his advance. Beyond the Great Wall, a caravan of shaggy, two-humped Bactrian camels, bells jingling from their necks, loped ahead of a Mongolian herdsman on a pony. A thin breeze tinkled the chimes hanging from the eaves of a Buddhist temple inside the town. In the distance, the Great Wall, leaving the town, snaked over serrated mountain ridges.
Morrison felt as though he had never been so alive to wonder and possibility. He spread out his cloak and they sat down side by side on it, enveloped in the magic of the night. Though every part of him was yearning to touch Mae, Morrison found himself beset by an accursed shyness that might have surprised acquaintances who thought of him as the most confident of men. He took a deep breath to calm himself, but the cold air seared his lungs and he had to stifle a cough.
Mae looked up at him with a playful expression. ‘How long must I wait before you kiss me?’ she demanded.
Mae Ruth Perkins’s soft mouth tasted of minted chocolate and black coffee, with a hint of meat and onions. She did not—thanks ye gods!—kiss like a virgin. Surprise quickly gave way to gratitude, and gratitude to sensuality. After some minutes, he pulled away to look at her, placing an ungloved hand on her cold cheek. She grasped it in both her own and, locking her eyes on to his, kissed it in such a silky manner that he felt dizzy. More revelations followed. Layers of clothing—not to mention freezing temperatures and a bed of ancient stone—proved no obstacle to her ability to deliver and command pleasure; her hands were as cunning as her kisses.
By the time they were ready to turn back, Morrison’s senses were aflame and his legs atremble; he felt as though his bones had been reduced to gelatine. She, on the other hand, had grown irrepressibly gay and was humming American show tunes as though nothing out of the ordinary had transpired.
‘Do you know “Good Old Summertime”? No? Blanche Ring sings it in the musical play The Defender. I saw it in New York’s Herald Square. She was wonderful.’ Mae launched into the song in a voice as husky, warm and throaty as that of Ethel Barrymore. ‘Come on. Your turn. What songs do you know? Court me with something.’
He hemmed and hawed.
‘You must know this one. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…”’
‘Maysie, Maysie…’
‘I like that.’
‘Oh, look,’ called Morrison, as they came upon the others, ‘here we are. Hello.’
It was hard to say whether Mrs Ragsdale, Dumas or the two servants were more relieved at their return. All were too frozen to complain. As the little group straggled back to the Six Kingdoms, only Mae appeared as fresh as if the evening had just begun.
Morrison, head still spinning, had just changed into his nightshirt when he heard a soft, insistent rapping on his door.
George Ernest Morrison had had considerable experience of forward young women in his two and two score years. Saucy Pepita, devastating Noelle, naughty Agneth. Three nameless Scottish tarts who allowed him to sprinkle their bodies with brandy and soda one memorable night whilst he was studying medicine in Edinburgh. The harlots, grisettes, bad girls and worse wives of a dozen countries. But nothing had prepared him for Miss Mae Ruth Perkins, who looked like a lady, was every bit a woman, but took her pleasure like a man. And whose charms, he already sensed, would prove more addictive than opium.