Free The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure by Adam Williams

news I’ve had this whole dreadful day.’
    â€˜You poor wee dear,’ said Nellie. ‘I thought you enjoyed the days you go off and talk to that murderous old Mandarin.’
    But Airton felt no desire to explain his bad mood. Morosely he sipped his whisky, wondering what he would say in chapel in half an hour. He thought of Septimus’s dreadful sermon, his ludicrous reference to the Samson story, and then he began to chuckle. ‘He fell off the roof!’
    â€˜What, dear?’
    â€˜Nothing, my love. Just thinking of what text we might use for the lesson this evening. What about a bit of Judges? The story of Samson, perhaps. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”’
    â€˜If your mind is still on Mr Delamere and his daughter, I think it would be very inappropriate. I can’t think that much sweetness could come out of a wicked old lion like him, however pretty young Helen Frances might set herself out to be.’
    â€˜Oh, Nellie, how cruel you are,’ said Airton. ‘And you haven’t even met the girl!’
    But they were both laughing. Nellie moved over and pecked her husband on the cheek. The door burst open: the children bounced in, and in a moment the whole Airton family was wrestling on the sofa, a scramble of limbs and flying cushions.

Two
    We pray in the temple for rain—but still the sun beats down on dry fields.
    Â 
    The British Legation was holding a picnic in the Western Hills. The cavalcade of broughams, carriages, palanquins, and horse riders had set out at six in the morning, escorted by a troop of mounted servants. Sir Claude MacDonald, Queen Victoria’s Minister to the Imperial Court, doyen of the diplomatic community and senior spokesman of those Western nations, including Japan and the USA, with an established and powerful presence in China, had quietly left Peking the night before and he and his wife were already waiting for their guests in the Taoist temple that they had converted into a weekend villa.
    Temples were rather easily adapted for diplomats’ holiday homes. There was nothing to be done about the green curlicued roofs and complicated wooden rafters, or the inset panels complete with carved dragons and large red pillars made of solid tree-trunks because these were part of the structure, but a lot could be achieved with imported wallpaper and clever lighting. A few sofas and chaises-longues, a solid mahogany dining table and a pianoforte, fine paintings on the walls, a copy of Landseer’s Dying Stag and a portrait of Lady MacDonald’s grandfather in Waterloo uniform, blended well with the lacquer screen, lanterns and Ming dynasty chairs; a delightful mélange of modern urban chic and tasteful chinoiserie . The two windows, which had had to be hacked out on either side of the original Hall of Worship, gave much-needed light, and Lady MacDonald had chosen elegant yellow curtains to compensate for the desecration. The foreigners were, on the whole, observant of local sensitivities—these were, after all, places of worship they had commandeered—and it was considered bad form to destroy any paintings, carvings or other works of religious art that they might find on the walls. That was where good English wallpaper came into its own. Lady MacDonald recalled how she had been startled on the first night she had stayed here by the faces of ancient, flaking demons and bodhisattvas grinning in the candlelight from a fifteenth-century painting on the back wall. A layer of William Morris had made all the difference and, what was more, the flowered design went very well with her Persian carpets.
    Proud as she was of the inside of her house, she was prouder still of the garden she had fashioned out of the courtyard. She had knocked down the outer wall and one of the shrines and planted a lawn that stretched to the edge of the cliff. She had laid out flower beds and herbaceous borders