Free A Most Immoral Woman by Linda Jaivin

bird had flown away. Yu-ti appeared shaken by his temper as she and the other servants busied themselves sweeping the courtyard and tidying up. Though brief, the tempest had left piles of grit on the roof tiles, piped sand along the latticework and deposited souvenirs of the Ordos Desert into the hearts of cabbages. Back inside, Morrison found it had insinuated sand into the pockets of clothes folded in wardrobes and chests, the pages of his books and the lens of his precious Brownie camera, which had been encased in leather and locked within a drawer in his study.
    Morrison dismantled the lens and blew on it, then brushed it with a feather. As he watched the drift of sand on his desk, a tune popped into his head. It won’t be a stylish marriage, / I can’t afford a carriage, / But you’ll look sweet upon the seat, / Of a bicycle built for two! How ridiculous he appeared, even to himself, humming out of tune. He could scarcely credit that just months earlier he had felt so debilitated by poor health that he’d considered leaving China altogether. Maysie, Maysie, give me your answer do. His blood flowed in his veins like that of a much younger man.

In Which Morrison Encounters the Bumptious
Egan, Whose Excellent Teeth Remind Him of the
Sorry State of His Own, and an Assignment from
His Editor Proves Just the Ticket
    The following morning, Morrison woke invigorated, organised his notes and had just begun drafting his telegram for The Times when Kuan entered with a letter from Granger.
    ‘My dear Morrison,’ it began, presumptuous in its familiarity. Cavilling over the course of nearly two pages that his telegrams were not being published as regularly as he had hoped, Granger then fretted over the reliability of both modern telegraphy and the post. He begged the indulgence of his esteemed colleague: would Morrison please ensure the enclosed report, obtained at the cost of much sweat and blood, reach the eyes of their editor in London? He would be eternally grateful.
    Morrison extracted the report and read it carefully.
    Damned badly drawn and inconsequential. Addle-headed idiot. He tore it up and tipped the scraps into the stove.
    Yesterday’s storm had scoured the sky to a cerulean magnificence. Morrison worked through lunch but, as the afternoon wore on, he found it impossible to keep himself at hisdesk. Buoyantly, he strode out into the breezy sunshine. The winds had strewn the candy-coloured petals of early-flowering apple and cherry blossoms about the streets like fragrant confetti. Through broad avenues and narrow hutong , Morrison wove his way through a dense traffic of merchants and peddlers, carters, ricksha pullers and palanquins. He passed Manchu ladies with lacquered wings of hair, beggars and Bannermen. The vendors’ sing-song cries, the chatter from the wine shops, the clatter of cart wheels and the shouts of the children kicking shuttlecocks rang in his ears. His nose was simultaneously assaulted by the rotten-egg smell of thawing sewage and delighted by the scents of toffee and pancakes. The streets of Peking were exhilarating and claustrophobic all at once, and he quickened his steps until he reached the ramp that led to the top of the Tartar City Wall.
    The wall was forty feet high and so wide in places that four carriages could be driven abreast. Hundreds of years old, the ramparts afforded an incomparable view of the city, including the golden-roofed halls, gardens and pavilions of the Imperial Palace itself. The Tartar City Wall was a place to contemplate history—China’s, Peking’s, one’s own, and to order one’s thoughts with the aid of the grand symmetry of the capital, with its north-south axis and clear, sacred geometry. It was a post from which one could observe the teeming, clamorous life in the streets below without having it present in every pore. Walking the Tartar Wall appealed for every reason to Morrison, himself a man of solid bulwarks, gated enceintes and complex