Before leaving the following morning, and whilst Mae’s back was turned, Morrison tipped Martin Egan’s cravat over the back of the bed. He was reluctant to go, but Sir Claude MacDonald had agreed to see him. He and Mae parted with tenderness. The thought of Egan’s imminent return to her side tormented him. He had not been so foolish as to try to extract a pledge of faithfulness.
Morrison stepped off the train at Dzushi, where the minister had his residence, into a field of sultry heat. Insects strummed the air and pine needles baked in the sun. Dragonflies skimmed over a puddle and, in the distance, mountains faded to a grey-blue wash like a painting in ink. Although nervy from lack of sleep, his mood was elevated and he felt open to sensation in every pore.
Sir Claude’s wife, Ethel, greeted him warmly. Morrison considered her the most attractive of the diplomats’ wives and had been ever mystified by Sir Claude’s luck. As she kissed him hello, he noticed that her hair was still thick and dark—not one grey hair. For a woman who had lost one husband and two children to cholera in India and then survived the siege with Sir Claude, this was no small miracle. The minister’s welcome was not so much cold as damp, his basset-hound eyes lugubrious, his handshake weak.
In the MacDonalds’ parlour, amongst the usual Far Eastern mélange of Western and Oriental furnishings, Ethel asked after old friends in Peking. Had Lady Susan finished her book on China? Was the I.G. well? How was the eccentric Edmund Backhouse—still translating the imperial gazettes for him? Was Bertie Lenox Simpson still up to his usual mischief?
Sir Claude, twirling the waxed ends of his moustache, noted that it was the thirteenth of June, four years to the day that hordes of Boxers launched their attack on Peking’s Legation Quarter.
‘So it was,’ said Morrison, surprised at himself for not remembering.
‘It was a terrible time.’ Ethel looked down at her hands, veined with age yet still graceful and fine. ‘And yet sometimes I find myself reminiscing as though they were almost halcyon days, even glamorous. Is that strange, do you think?’
‘No,’ Morrison replied, ‘not at all. Sometimes the worst of times make the best of memories.’
Over cups of Indian tea, they slipped into shared remembrances. Of the French minister, Pichon, in his nightshirt patterned with red songbirds, wailing ‘Nous allons tous mourir ce soir’—every bloody soir—until they almost wished they would die, just to be free of him. ‘Nous sommes perdu!’ he would weep, and how they all wished he would get perdu himself, the sooner the better. They recalled how old Von Below of the German Legation banged out Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries on the piano as though to usher in the apocalypse—and sometimes, Sir Claude reminded them, just to drown out the screams from outside the Legation walls. Morrison and the MacDonalds fell silent for a minute.
‘I remember drinking from a bottle of vermouth that had been sliced through its neck by a bullet.’ Morrison chuckled and the mood lightened again.
‘And those dinners of curried racing pony or pigeon ragout washed down with champagne,’ Ethel said. ‘Dinners for which the Italian minister always dressed in formal attire.’
Morrison recalled how less than a month before the siege, on the twenty-fourth of May 1900, the MacDonalds had hosted a magnificent celebration for Queen Victoria’s eighty-first birthday. The afternoon of the party, in a hutong not far from the Legations, Morrison had observed a young Boxer acolyte chanting himself into a trance and slashing at the air with his sword. It had made a good anecdote that evening. He had led Lady Ethel into dinner on his arm. They had waltzed on the tennis courts under red paper lanterns to the Inspector General’s own dance band.
Morrison could see the scene as if it were yesterday. He had danced with his hostess, as well as the outrageous Lady Bredon, the lovely Juliet, the eminently squeezable Miss Brazier and the fat and gushing Polly Condit Smith, whom, not long after, he would rescue from the Western Hills together with Mrs Squiers. They had toasted the Queen again and again and the revels had lasted until the wee hours. The following morning, Morrison awoke to the news that whilst they’d been feasting, the Boxers had committed a horrific massacre of missionaries, only eighty miles outside of Peking. Throats slit. Limbs hacked off. Women defiled. On the eighth of June, the Boxers entered the outskirts of the city and burned down the grandstands at the Peking racecourse. Three days later, they dragged the chancellor of the Japanese Legation, Mr Sugiyama, from his cart and stabbed him to death, ripping the heart from his chest. Two days after that, the Boxers, encountering no resistance from the imperial Ch’ing forces, tore into the city and began torching the foreign buildings and slaughtering the converts. The siege began in earnest.
‘We have lived through remarkable times,’ Sir Claude said. ‘But,’ he addressed his guest, ‘you have not come here to reminisce.’
It occurred to Morrison, as he followed his host to the study, that whilst he had never lived life by halves, some time towards the end of the previous year, 1903, the adrenalin had run out and he had slumped into middle age. He had begun to surrender to his body’s complaints. He’d grown cautious and cynical in spirit. And from the start of this new conflict, he’d been obsessed with minutiae (the number of rounds of ammunition smuggled in mail bags, the names of warships, even counting how many Russian troops guarded the platform of Newchang’s railway station), the whole time dogged by the feeling that he was missing the real story. Not just of the war but of life. He hadn’t dwelt on it, for his quotidian existence never lacked for stimulation. When he’d met Mae, he could hear his heart beating fast again. He still could not say if that quickening was the source of love, proof that it was possible, or something else entirely.
He was pleased with himself for having prepared for this meeting the day before, as, face to face with Sir Claude, he suddenly felt very tired. ‘We have decided to surrender the charter of the Haimun,’ he opened, testing the diplomat’s reaction.
‘Don’t do that.’
‘No?’ Morrison kept a poker face.
‘Not until I see Baron Komura.’
Komura was Japan’s foreign minister. ‘When will that happen?’
‘Thursday. But before that, you, James and I will meet with General Fukushima.’
Morrison wondered if he had underestimated MacDonald.
On the train back to Tokio, the surfeit of tension and dearth of sleep caused him to nod off, his chin tipped forward onto his chest. He could barely keep his eyes open at dinner that night with James, to whom he delivered the following assessment of MacDonald’s promise to help: ‘Weak, flippant, garrulous and possibly insincere. But our main hope.’
The following morning, Morrison awoke to the sound of rain. Pouring like blue blazes. After moving to the Imperial, he wrote a loving note to Mae, telling her he was tied up with work but would call her after his meeting with Sir Claude and Fukushima at the British Legation. He felt light as air.
General Fukushima didn’t mince words. The Haimun was nothing less than an impediment to Japanese military operations; it interfered with their communications and, given the Russians’ overt hostility towards it, was a danger to itself. Japan did not wish to concern itself with the protection of such a vessel when it was fighting a war. Morrison suggested that if they did give up the Haimun, at least James should be guaranteed special accreditation and assistance in reaching the front.
‘We’d be pleased with such a concession,’ Sir Claude said, backing the request.
‘It won’t be necessary,’ Fukushima responded, the picture of geniality.
‘Why not?’ James’s question was a controlled explosion.
‘Because we shall be taking Port Arthur in such a short time that no correspondent could make it there in time by land to see the victory.’
‘Of course.’ Sir Claude nodded, evidently satisfied with the answer.
The minute James was alone with Morrison, all restraint evaporated. ‘The vacillating bastard agrees with our case one minute and is persuaded by Fukushima the next! Can’t he see that the problem lies in a lack of understanding between the Japanese navy, which sees the advantage to itself of the Haimun, and the rest of the Japanese military—represented by the infuriating Fukushima—which does not! You must do something.’
Morrison did not see what he could do. Advising James to calm down, he excused himself to make a phone call.
‘Hello?’ A sleepy purr.
‘Maysie.’
‘You always sound so urgent. It makes me feel like the heroine in a melodrama.’
‘And so you are.’
‘How’s the war?’
‘We haven’t won it yet. Two excruciating hours with Sir Claude and General Fukushima and all we managed to extract was the promise of greater frustration.’
‘Ohh. Poor baby,’ she cooed.
‘I am dying to see you.’
‘Don’t,’ Maysie said. ‘It’s not attractive.’
Morrison’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Don’t what?’
‘Oh, not you, honey. I’m talking to Martin.’
Martin? Morrison’s voice cramped, tight and narrow as a woman’s boot.
‘Hello? Are you there, honey?’ she asked.
‘I had wanted to ask if you would like to come to Tokio tomorrow.’
‘Of course I will. I look forward to it. Meet me at Shinbashi Station. Kisses for now.’
Picturing Egan having to listen to that, Morrison actually felt sorry for his rival.