Free Enchanted Evening by M. M. Kaye Page A

the left, Mother’s and Tacklow’s to the right), while the far side of the courtyard was taken up by the reception room, where the original occupant had received visitors, and the drawing-room. There was one more courtyard: the garden courtyard, which may once have lived up to its name, but which had been sadly neglected. It consisted of a square of overgrown grass that showed signs of being hastily and very roughly chopped down, probably with a kitchen knife, and a single almond tree, now yellow-leaved in autumn, but a delight in spring. This courtyard was reached by way of a small passage in the extreme corner of the bedroom-and-reception courtyard, and included a gardener’s shed and a tiny greenhouse in which our Chinese gardener performed miracles of horticulture, right through the coldest of cold weather and despite the terrible Peking dust-storms and the scorching summers.
    The en suite master bedroom boasted a large nineteen-twenties European-style double bed, draped in dull gold satin. But the beds in both Bets’s bedroom and mine were proper Chinese kangs : hollow oblongs, roughly four feet high and five across, built of mud bricks plastered over, and with a small hole in one side through which sticks and live charcoal could be thrust in to make a fire during the winter months. A thick mattress would be laid on top, and this, together with several padded quilts (plus pillows in place of the wooden neck-rests that the original owners would have used), made warm and wonderfully comfortable beds.
    The most spectacular room was the reception room, which like the dining-room was panelled and decorated in lacquer. Red lacquer this time, the proper, classic red. It may sound gaudy but was in fact beautiful. Here once again (as throughout the entire house) the windows were covered by a delicate fretwork of carved red lacquer, and against the far wall, directly opposite the french windows by which one entered the Hall of Welcome, was a wonderful lacquer screen, against which stood a magnificent red lacquer throne on which, I presume, the master of the house used to sit in state to receive his guests.
    Chinese characters in gold leaf decorated the walls, and about the only thing that wasn’t red or gold was the polished wooden floor, on which, when our heavy luggage had been unpacked, we laid Tacklow’s tiger-skin, an object that greatly impressed the servants.
    At one end of the reception hall, partitioned from the rest by carved and lacquered archways, was a small reading room furnished with a couple of bookcases and a round table and four chairs, also of carved lacquer. And it was here on the wall that Tacklow hung the Kossu scroll that he had bought for a modest sum from a corporal who had served in the French contingent of the International Brigade that had marched to the relief of the Europeans besieged in the British Residency in Peking during the grim days of the Boxer Rising.
    Having lifted the siege and restored order in the city and the countryside around it, the International Brigade had got down to some serious looting, and there was no doubt that the Kossu scroll had been filched from the home of some local mandarin – not, I would have said, a very high-ranking one, for the scroll is not by any means a ‘showpiece’.
    Kossu, one of the great works of art of China, is a very fine tapestry and in the best examples of the work every single colour that appears on it, however small, is woven into it. But in this scroll, though each of the main pieces is woven, the detail, such as the pattern of the flowers, stars and bats-of-happiness on the dress, are only painted and not woven. Still, it is a very attractive example of Chinese art, and never before had it shown to such advantage as it did here. The lacquerwork provided a perfect setting for it. I knew that in bringing it back to Peking we had brought it back to the city it had been stolen from and I used to wonder sometimes if,