A Most Immoral Woman by Linda Jaivin Read Free Book Online Page B

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 thecapital, 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