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.’
‘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.