Free Enchanted Evening by M. M. Kaye

more of these ill-disposed djinns, the prudent householder installs a second gate, facing the entrance and permanently locked, which since it does not extend beyond the gateposts each side of it allows anyone coming in to walk round it and into the inner courtyards, but forces any evil spirit one might have picked up in the course of shopping or visiting friends to beat a retreat.
    The door of our Spirit Gate was of green lacquer, faded by the years to a pale shade of its original turquoise green. The base and steps were of weather-worn marble, while the uprights and roof ends were lacquer red, and the tiles, like those on the rest of the roofs, were Imperial Yellow, denoting the fact that it had belonged to a member of the royal line. The ends of the wooden beams had once been coloured, and it must have been a flamboyant sight when the house was new. I preferred it the way it was, worn and faded by the centuries and totally charming. The whole courtyard had once been lacquered in red, and in place of glass in the windows there was oiled paper, which let in light but preserved privacy and, unlike glass, is not a conductor of heat or cold, so that it helped keep the rooms behind a lot warmer in winter, and slightly cooler in summer.
    The house, like all Chinese houses, consisted of a series of courtyards, the sides of which were rooms that faced into the open courtyards. The first courtyard, where the Spirit Gate stood, was a small one, and led by way of three or four stone steps to a door that gave on to a open corridor surrounded by blank walls, in one of which was the entrance to the first courtyard proper. Here again a small pair of stone lion-dogs stood guard on either side of the top of the steps that led through the ornamental gateway. The rooms on each side of this courtyard were guest-rooms, and the one that faced you as you came through the second gate was a single long room that filled the whole side of the open courtyard.
    This was the dining-room, the most beautiful room in the house. The furniture in it was blackwood and black lacquer, and set in one of the two end walls was a huge clock which, we were told, was the oldest clock in China. It was of European manufacture, supposed to have been brought to Peking by a Jesuit priest as a gift to some bygone Emperor from a King of France. It was not a particularly beautiful object, though it was in its way a work of art. Its roman numerals were black, each on a separate small shield of white enamel, inlaid on a larger shield of elaborately worked bronze in a circular frame of black lacquer. The bronze shield was almost certainly a Chinese addition, because it was covered with a beautifully worked design of chrysanthemum flowers in the Chinese manner, and I imagine that the white enamel shields, the hands and all the mechanism were brought into the country separately, and set on the bronze background at a later date. What was astonishing was that it still worked!
    The dining-table was a marvel of lacquerwork; so mirror-smooth that at first sight I would have sworn it was just that – a long slab of black looking-glass that was reflecting the few pieces of silver placed on it and the gold and red of the Chinese lanterns hanging above. The walls, both here and in the drawing-room, were covered with ordinary close-woven sacking which provided a marvellous background for the decorative openwork panels of carved blackwood that overlaid it, and complemented the spidery elegance of the lacquerwork chairs, the gorgeous jewel colours of the enormous cloisonné vases that stood one at each end of the sideboard, and a thin, worn carpet on which a pair of dragons writhed in fiery gold against a background of faded yellow. Whenever I look at the photographs that Mother took of that fabulous house, I think, ‘Oh, if only colour photography had been invented by then!’
    The rooms surrounding the next courtyard were, on either side, our bedrooms (Bets’s and mine to