A Most Immoral Woman Read Free Page A

Room in North China in Winter
    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,’ heinsisted 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.