The Concubine's Secret

8

They walked until the sky lost its bright sheen and turned a muted crimson, the colour of molten metal as it cools. Its light washed everything with a soft pink hue that belied the harshness of the landscape, but it suited Lydia’s mood. She was sick of sharp edges, sick of black and white, sick of right and wrong. She thought she knew herself, knew where she ended and others began, knew where to stop and where to start. But now… now she didn’t seem to know any more. Was she trying to do too much? Was she not as strong as she believed herself to be? As Chang An Lo believed her to be?

‘You have the heart of a lion,’ he’d whispered to her once, as he ran a lock of her coppery hair through his fingers, ‘as well as the mane of one.’

He’d lifted the curl to his lips and she’d thought he was going to kiss it, but he didn’t. Instead he closed his teeth over the end, slowly and deliberately biting through it, so that a finger’s length disappeared into his mouth. His black eyes fixed on hers as he swallowed it and a shiver of excitement had rippled through her. She watched his throat work as the hair from her own head slid into the tunnels within him.

‘Now you are a part of me,’ he’d said simply, and gave her that slow smile of his that stopped her heart. ‘Now I can listen to you roar inside me.’

She’d laughed and lain in his arms, growling at him, nipping his collarbone with her teeth, dragging her nails across the taut skin of his chest.

‘Lydia?’ It was Alexei. His head was tipped to one side so that he could peer up into her face. ‘Are you still with me?’

He said it lightly, with an easy laugh, but behind the words she could hear the concern, the uncertainty. He was doubting her too. From the moment they set foot on the pavement outside the printing shop, Alexei had hooked her arm through his own and set a good pace as he strode through the town. He’d steered her past the imposing pillars of the Lenin Library and into a quiet park that was laid out with gravel paths, edged with hoops of decorative ironwork. To Lydia they looked like open mouths begging for food. They forced images of the labour camp into her head.

She locked her arm tight against her brother’s. The place was deserted. Yet it felt busy because there was so much movement and commotion around them as the wind battered the bare branches, or chased a newspaper around the central statue on its plinth. Empty Belomor cigarette packets and a trail of abandoned peanut shells swirled under their feet, and all the time that they walked, Alexei talked. His words soothing her, quietening her. The flow of them creating firm footholds in her mind as, with infinite delicacy, he fed the words into the silence. Step by step he retraced their plans, bringing her with him, reminding her, leading her, not letting her slip away.

Alexei patted his waist where his bodybelt lay securely fastened next to his skin and smiled at her, for once without that look of detachment that so often guarded his thoughts. They had left the park and were heading down a road through an area where the houses were smaller, but showily decorated with carved shutters.

‘We have money,’ he reminded her. ‘We have diamonds and we have new identity papers for our father. We are well prepared, Lydia.’

‘I know.’

‘We always knew it was going to be dangerous to attempt to bribe the guards at the camp. Finding the right one, a guard so greedy he will sell his soul and risk anything – even execution – to have-’

‘I know.’ A pause. ‘I know.’ The wind snatched at her words.

‘It will take us time,’ he said quietly. ‘We can’t – you mustn’t – rush into any risks that-’

‘I know.’

He let a silence drift between them but still held her arm laced through his. She could feel the strength in his hand where it was fastened on her wrist and the strength of the mind that controlled it.

‘Alexei.’

‘What is it?’

‘Do you think Jens was one of those prisoners?’

She felt a muscle tighten in his hand, heard his intake of breath. ‘Pulling that timber wagon, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s unlikely.’ His voice was as calm as if discussing the possibility of rain.

‘I thought one man seemed to have red hair.’

‘No, Lydia, we were much too far away. You couldn’t possibly see that. It’s wishful thinking. Anyway it may not be red any more.’

They looked at each other, then walked in silence, the street growing narrower, the neighbourhood rougher. The well-built brick homes gave way to shapeless wooden houses which were looking tired and shabby. A honey-coloured mongrel in a doorway whined at them as they passed.

Wishful thinking.

I wish. I think. Oh yes, Papa, Alexei is right. I wish for you and I think of you… and I am frightened for you. My blood runs cold when I picture you, a green-eyed Viking, condemned to exist underground in one of the mines.

‘The man who built this town was a visionary,’ Alexei interrupted her thoughts. He had turned away, so she could only see his profile with its high forehead and straight, uncompromising nose, but his mouth was curved into a line of approval.

‘What do you mean?’ She had no interest in the town.

‘His name was Leonid Ventov.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I did my research. When preparing for battle, you reconnoitre the land.’

Lydia loved him for that, the way he kept them safe. She squeezed his arm. ‘Tell me about this Leonid Ventov of yours.’

‘He was an industrialist from Odessa at the end of the last century. He grew fat and rich on what he discovered lay under this cold black soil, huge deposits of coal and iron ore, but he was a fiercely religious man. So instead of just stripping the land bare and leaving it raped and useless, he built this town of Felanka as a beautifully designed thank you to his god. He tried to persuade others in the growing breed of wealthy industrialists to do the same throughout Russia but…’ His voice trailed away.

Lydia felt his attention focus abruptly elsewhere. She glanced ahead as they emerged from the shadow of a row of houses and saw what it was that had drawn his interest. Ahead of them at the edge of town stretched a flat, dull landscape, deserted except for one wide rutted road that ran straight to the iron foundry about a kilometre away. The brick building was hunched and forbidding, as if waiting for night to fall when it would stalk closer to the town under cover of darkness. Its stacks stretched upwards, like fingers raking the crimson sky, and belched a thick black smoke which today was swept away from the town by the east wind. But still the air tasted sour and stung the nostrils.

Lydia examined it with interest. ‘So this is where we’ll bring him?’

‘Da. As soon as we’ve got Jens out of the camp, we’ll need to hide him. What better place than in a foundry where blackened faces and constantly changing shifts are the norm? Among that vast throng of metal workers, he would pass unnoticed. But first…’

‘We have to find a worker willing to take him in there.’

‘Exactly. That’s what your Cossack and I will start work on tonight.’

‘Alexei?’

Their footsteps slowed, finally halting on the edge of the frozen landscape that ranged for miles in every direction. Only the foundry itself was built in a sunken hollow, as though its creator had endeavoured to keep it as much out of sight as possible, its ugliness an affront to the splendour of his god. Now, with religion nothing more than a dirty word, just something the Politburo wiped their Communist boots on, the factories and foundries of Russia had become the new churches.

‘Alexei?’ Lydia said again, her finger tapping his arm insistently.

He nodded to indicate he was listening, but his eyes still scrutinised the approach road to the foundry. Somewhere unseen, the sound of a truck starting up drifted to their ears.

‘I’ve thought of an idea,’ she said.

She felt his arm stiffen. He looked at her quickly. ‘What idea?’

‘I need to help. At the moment it’s just you and Popkov sniffing out a guard and a foundry worker who will take a bribe, while I sit twiddling my thumbs, just waiting for you to-’

‘For God’s sake, Lydia, what do you expect? If you start putting your face about and asking questions, you’ll throw us all in danger.’ He tightened his grip on her hand. ‘Don’t!’ he said. His green eyes probed hers intently. ‘Whatever it is, don’t! Do you hear me? Don’t!’

There was a long silence between them, broken only by the truck engine approaching. Lydia was the first who looked away, not because she was nervous of him but because she didn’t want him to see how angry she was. She tried to remove her hand from his arm but he refused to release it. The sky was losing its colour and the first wings of darkness were gliding in from the west.

‘Let’s go back,’ Lydia said.

They turned and retraced their steps along the narrow streets in silence.

The truck overtook them. It was empty and bouncing along at speed, kicking up dust and trailing a foul odour in its wake, but just ahead a handcart had tumbled on to its side in the middle of the road, spewing out cabbages that rolled into the gutter like loose heads. The truck sounded its horn then juddered to a halt. As Lydia and Alexei approached, the blond young driver of the truck wound down his window, leaned out and treated Lydia to an inviting smile that displayed perfect teeth under the sparse beginnings of a moustache. He was wearing a navy woollen cap pulled down at an angle over one eye, giving him the air of an adventurer.

‘Hello, beautiful,’ he called. ‘Ti takaya krasivaya.’

Lydia felt Alexei bristle but nevertheless she looked up into the cab of the truck and gave the driver an answering smile. ‘Dobriy vecher,’ she responded. ‘Good evening.’

‘Want a lift?’

She let the question hang in the air and felt both men alert to her answer. Alexei still held her hand on his arm but made no attempt to speak, looking deliberately straight ahead at the cart being manhandled out of the way.

‘Nyet. But thanks anyway.’ She gave the driver a slow sideways glance and heard him laugh delightedly.

He leaned down in his cab and brought up something small in his hand, which he tossed out the window to her. It arced between them, spiralling and twisting, until Lydia snatched it out of the air with her free hand. It was just a metal disc, no bigger than a coin but polished to perfection, with the name Kolya engraved on it. The driver waved to her and drove on over the cabbages, leaving them with a belch of exhaust fumes and a long blast on his horn.

‘I bet he keeps one of those in his truck for every girl he passes,’ Alexei muttered, and it amused Lydia to see he was irritated by the little gift. She twirled the flat disc between her fingers and the last rays of sunlight turned it to fire.

‘It’s an omen,’ she laughed and swept off her ugly hat, letting her hair leap free.

She had learned about omens from Chang An Lo; how the gods sent them as a sign. Westerners had lost the skill of recognising them, but Chang had taught her how to feel for them with her fox spirit.

‘Lydia, there’s no such thing as-’

‘Of course there is.’ She spun the gleaming disc. ‘See the fire in it. It matches me. Don’t you see? It means I’m meant to be here. The omen burns so bright, it shows we’re destined for success. ’

Alexei had stopped in the middle of the street and was staring at her, disbelief written all over his face. But she didn’t miss the laughter in his eyes.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘shall I tell you my idea?’

‘The answer is still no.’

Lydia stood alone in her bedroom in the hostel, her limbs too stiff and unyielding to let her curl up on the bed and seek refuge in sleep. It was as if they took orders now from Alexei instead of from herself. She heard his words still rattling round inside her skull with a persistence that drove her to fret at the hat in her hands, pulling threads out of it when really what she wanted to do was pull threads out of Alexei.

The answer is still no.

That’s what he’d said, over and over again. ‘I will not allow you to go wandering off on your own. The answer is no.’

Her plan was straightforward, simple really. While he and Popkov spent the next few days or weeks – however long it took – combing through the detritus of the back streets, prodding and poking at it to find the weak points, she would return to the railway station and endeavour to buy a ticket to travel back the way they’d come, in the direction of Selyansk.

‘Why?’ he’d asked, eyes narrowed. ‘What would be the point of that?’

‘To travel past the prison camp’s Work Zone again.’

Alexei had exhaled sharply through his teeth, a low whistling sound she noticed he made only when caught off guard by a sudden strong emotion. It should have warned her.

‘You see,’ she rushed on, ‘I might be able to find a way to pass a message into the camp. Now we know that these trains carry prisoners in transit as well, I might find a way of contacting one and…’ She slowed the words to make him listen, she knew her brother hated disorder. ‘He might seek out Papa… Jens Friis,… and tell him he might…’

‘That’s a lot of mights.’

She felt a flush rise up her cheeks. ‘You and Popkov might not have success in bribing officials, who might just chuck you both straight into the prison camp instead, leaving me stranded here on my own. That,’ she’d said, snatching her hand away from his arm, ‘might happen. And then what?’

They were standing in the narrow street outside a house whose shutters hung on broken hinges, its roof patched unevenly. Darkness was beginning to roll down the centre of the road in long, strange-shaped shadows, a straggle of horse-drawn carts trundling along behind them.

‘Lydia.’ He did not attempt to retrieve her hand. ‘We must all three of us take care. Listen to me. I cannot do my task here properly if all the time I am looking over my shoulder, worried about what antics you’re getting up to.’

‘Antics?’

‘Call them what you will, but can’t you see that I have to be the one who asks the questions to-’

‘Why? Because you are a man?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s not right.’

‘Right or wrong doesn’t come into it, Lydia. It’s the way it is. You are ranimaya just because you are a woman, and-’

‘What does ranimaya mean?’ She hated asking.

‘It means vulnerable.’

‘Well I think maybe the Communists have got it right.’

He studied her face with such concentration that she almost turned away.

‘And what exactly,’ he asked, ‘do you mean by that?’

‘That Communists give women greater equality, they recognise us as…’

A tiny child, impossible to tell whether girl or boy and with a mop of greasy curls and mucus encrusted under its nose, abruptly materialised at Lydia’s knee. Round, brown eyes stared up at her with the moist hopefulness of a puppy’s, but when she smiled at the child it tottered backwards and stuck a filthy thumb into its mouth.

‘We’re becoming a spectacle,’ Alexei murmured.

He released a long, exasperated sigh which annoyed Lydia, and glanced further along the street to where a man was propped against a windowsill, smoking a pipe. His eyes, behind a pair of spectacles bound together with black tape on the bridge of his nose, were observing them with quiet interest. Alexei took hold of Lydia’s upper arm and tried to propel her forward, but she refused to move. She pulled away from him and squatted down on the pavement in front of the child. From her pocket she extracted a coin, took the grubby hand that wasn’t otherwise occupied into her own, and wrapped the little fingers around the rouble. They felt as cold and slippery as tiny fish.

‘For something to eat,’ she smiled gently.

The child said nothing. But the thumb in the mouth suddenly popped out and ran down Lydia’s hair, past the side of her jaw and on to her neck. It was repeated twice. She wondered if the child expected the strands to be hot like fire. With no sound the curly creature turned and waddled with surprising speed towards an open door three houses away. Lydia rose to her feet and rejoined her brother. Side by side but no longer touching, she and Alexei continued up the street at a brisk pace.

‘If you hand out money to every filthy urchin we stumble over in the streets,’ he muttered, ‘we’ll have none left for ourselves. ’

For a long while they walked on in stiff silence, but just when they passed the park once more, where the wind was still chasing its tail and pursuing the sheets of newspaper, Lydia suddenly snapped, ‘The trouble with you, Alexei, is that you’ve never been poor.’

At the hostel they parted with few words. It was one of the new buildings, deprived of any iron scrollwork, faceless and totally forgettable. Others like it were springing up throughout the town to house the expanding workforce, but it was clean and anonymous which suited them both.

In the entrance hall someone had hung a large mirror, flecked with black age spots like the back of an old man’s hand, and in it Lydia caught sight of her and Alexei’s reflection. It took her by surprise, the image of the two of them. They both looked so… She struggled for the word, abandoned thinking in Russian and settled for so inappropriate. With a jolt she realised they didn’t blend in at all. Alexei was taller than she’d realised and, though his heavy coat was right in every respect and the way his gloves were patched on two fingers was perfect – she suspected he’d purposely torn and then sewn them up himself – nothing else about him fitted in with the dreary little entrance hall. Everything here was plain and utilitarian, whereas Alexei was elaborate and elegant, even when clothed in a drab overcoat. He was like that wrought ironwork outside, carefully crafted and irresistible to the eye.

The thought bothered her. For the first time she wondered if Liev Popkov was right. Alexei could be a danger to them because people noticed him. Yet tonight he was venturing out among the town’s lowlife to start asking questions and she wanted to tell him not to do it. Don’t. You might get hurt.

‘Alexei,’ she said in a low voice, ‘make certain you keep Popkov close by you tonight.’

He raised one eyebrow at her. That was all.

‘You might need him,’ she insisted.

But he took no notice and she knew he was still angry with her about the plan to return to Trovitsk Camp on her own. He was just too damn arrogant to let his little sister tell him what to do. Well, to hell with him. Let him get himself strung up by his thumbs for all she cared. She looked away and once again bumped into her own reflection in the mottled mirror. She swore under her breath.

‘Chyort!’

The girl inside the mirror wasn’t her. Surely it wasn’t. That girl looked utterly dejected, her heart-shaped face thin and nervous. Her eyes were watchful and her hair far too colourful for her own good. Lydia quickly yanked her stupid hat from her pocket, pulled it on even though they were now indoors, and jammed her hair up under it with sharp little jabs that scraped her ears.

‘Alexei,’ she said and found him observing her with that cool scrutiny he was so adept at, ‘if you keep Popkov at your side this evening, I promise I’ll stay shut in my room and not put a foot outside the door until you’re back.’

Would he thank her? Would he appreciate that for once she was offering him peace of mind?

His slow infuriating smile crept up one side of his mouth and for a split second she was foolish enough to think he was going to laugh and accept her offer. Instead the green of his eyes turned a chilly mistrustful greyish shade that reminded her of the Peiho River in Junchow, which could catch you out in the blink of an eye just when you thought it was looking warm and inviting.

‘Lydia,’ he said, so softly no one else would have been able to detect the carefully controlled anger, ‘you’re lying to me.’

She spun on her heel and stalked off down the stubby brown corridor that led to the stairs, her boots clicking on the floorboards. He made her so mad she wanted to spit.