The Concubine's Secret

12

Lydia lay back on her bed and thought about the bargain she had struck with Alexei. She had promised to stay in her room in exchange for keeping Popkov at his side tonight, but would he stick to his word? Her nerves were tight and her eyelids burned. That was the trouble with making deals with people, you never knew whether they’d let you down. She stared up at the ceiling, at a damp patch on it that had oozed into the shape of a giraffe, probably a few leaky pipes up there. Like leaky tongues, they couldn’t be trusted.

Your Russian is excellent. Elena’s words drifted back to her and brought with them similar words she had once said to Chang herself. She murmured them now: ‘Your English is excellent.’ It had been summertime and the Chinese sky was huge that day, a bright peacock-blue sheet of silk shimmering above them. She smiled at the memory and let her mind spiral down into it as readily as a bee spirals down into the sweet overpowering scent of an orchid. She didn’t struggle against it. Not this time. Day after day here in this cold Russian landscape she was fighting to mould a future, but this time, just for tonight, she allowed herself the sweet fluid pleasure of slipping back into the past.

Chang An Lo had led her down a dirt track to Lizard Creek, a small wooded inlet to the east of the town of Junchow. The morning sun lazed on the surface of the water and the birch trees offered dappled shade to the flat grey rocks.

‘I am honoured that you think my English acceptable,’ Chang had replied politely.

Her heart had been racing. It was a risk, coming here alone with a young man she scarcely knew, and to make matters even worse he was Chinese and a Communist. Her mother would tie her to the bedpost if she knew. But already their lives, his and hers, had become entwined in a way she barely understood. She could feel the hooks like tiny little darts sinking into the soft and tender parts of her body, into her stomach and the thin white flesh of her thighs. Tugging at the strong beat of her heart. His stillness was as elegant as his movements, in a black V-necked tunic and loose trousers. Horrible rubber shoes on his feet. Earlier he had waited for her outside the English church where she had greeted him very formally, hands together and eyes on the ground, bowing to him.

‘I wish to thank you. You saved me in the alleyway and I am grateful. I owe you thanks.’

He did not move, not a muscle shifted in his face or body but something changed somewhere deep inside him, as if a closed place had opened. The warmth that flowed from him took her by surprise.

‘No,’ he said, eyes fixed intently on her. ‘You do not owe me your thanks.’ He came one step closer, so close she could see tiny secret flecks of purple in his eyes. ‘The people traffickers would have cut your throat when they were done with you. You owe me your life.’

‘My life is my own. It belongs to no one but me.’

‘And I owe you mine. Without you I would be dead. That foreign devil policeman’s bullet would be in my head now and I would be with my ancestors, if you had not come out of the night and stopped him.’ He bowed very low. ‘I owe you my life.’

‘Then we’re even.’ She’d laughed, uncertain how serious this was meant to be. ‘A life for a life.’

Now at the creek she noticed the way he squatted down on a patch of grass at the edge of the water, keeping his distance from her, and she wondered if he was being careful not to alarm her. Or was it because he couldn’t bear to be near a foreign devil, yet another fanqui? She was lazing on a slab of rock, stretching out her bare ankles in the sun, ducking her face under the brim of her straw hat. It was battered and her dress was old. They embarrassed her. She stared at a small brown bird attempting to extract a juicy grub from a fallen branch and hoped Chang An Lo wouldn’t look at her.

‘I had an English tutor for many years in Peking,’ he continued. ‘He taught me well.’

She peered at him from under the shade of her hat and was shocked to see him unwinding a blood-soaked cloth from his foot. Oh God, the guard dog that attacked him last night when he came to help her at the Ulysses Club. Its teeth must have done far more damage than she’d realised. She felt a wave of nausea at the sight of his skin hanging in scarlet strips from the bone. A physical pain in her chest. How could he walk on a foot in that state?

He glanced up and caught her staring open-mouthed at his wound. Her gaze rose and for a long moment their eyes met and held. He looked away. She watched in silence as he placed his foot in the swirling flow of the river and rubbed it with his fingers, so that clots of blood drifted to the surface, making the water speckled with brown spots like a fish’s back. Quickly she rose and knelt on the grass beside him. In her hand lay the needle and thread he had asked her to fetch for him. Now she understood why.

‘You’ll need these,’ she said and held them out.

But as he reached for them, she made a decision and lifted them away from him. ‘Would it help,’ she asked, ‘if I did it?’

A spark she couldn’t decipher leapt into his eyes. Their blackness seemed to be consumed by something bright and untouchable. She swallowed, appalled at what she’d just offered.

The first time she pushed the needle in she expected him to cry out, but he didn’t. She darted a look of concern at his face. To her amazement he seemed to be staring at her hair and smiling, his black eyes full of secret thoughts. After that she just kept sewing. In fact she became bolder, concentrating more on making the work neater than on whether it hurt, aware of the scars it would leave. All the time she rinsed away the blood with her handkerchief so that she could see what she was doing, and carefully avoided thinking about the white glimpses of delicate bone underneath.

When it was over she pulled off her underskirt, used Chang’s knife to cut it into strips and bound up his foot. It looked clumsy but it was the best she could do. Chyort! She was no better at bandaging than she was at sewing. Without even asking she cut his shoe open and tied it on the underside of the bandage with two more strips of cloth.

‘There,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘That’s better.’

‘Thank you.’

Chang gave her a deep bow as he sat on the grass and she had the feeling he didn’t want her to see his face. Why? What was it that he was holding back from her?

‘Don’t thank me. If we go around saving each other’s lives, then that makes us responsible for each other. Don’t you think?’ She laughed lightly.

She heard him inhale sharply. Had her words annoyed him? Had she presumed too much? She felt suddenly out of her depth, uncertain where to place her foot in these unfathomable and unfamiliar Chinese waters. She scrambled to her feet, kicked off her sandals and waded into the shallows. The creek rippled against her legs, cooling her skin, and she splashed water over the hem of her dress to remove the blood from it. His blood. Entwined in the fibres of her clothes. She stared at it, touched one of the smears with the tip of her finger and stopped rinsing it away into the river.

‘Lydia Ivanova.’

It was the first time he’d spoken her name. On his tongue it sounded different. Less Russian. More…

‘Lydia Ivanova,’ he said again, his voice quiet as the breeze through the grass, ‘what is it that is such trouble to you?’

She felt a tremor. She didn’t know if it was in her own blood or in the water, but in that bright sunlit moment she knew she’d got it wrong. He could see right through her, her thoughts as transparent to him as the water droplets that trailed behind her hand. That intake of breath she’d heard wasn’t annoyance. It was because he knew, as she knew, that they were responsible for each other now. As she looked across at Chang An Lo where he was resting on his elbows, watching her with his black gaze, their eyes fixed on each other and she was aware of something tangible forming between them. A kind of thread, shimmering through the air. It was as elusive as a ripple in the river, yet as strong as one of the steel cables that held the new bridge over the Peiho.

‘Tell me, Lydia, what lies so heavy on your heart?’

She released the hem of her dress and as it floated around her legs, she was again acutely aware of how shabby it was. She made her decision.

‘Chang An Lo,’ she said, ‘I need your help.’

‘I stole a necklace from a man’s coat pocket last night.’ She was back on her rock, perched like one of the orange lizards, head up and limbs tense, ready to flee. ‘In the Ulysses Club.’

The Ulysses Club was the haunt of the British colonials in the International Settlement in Junchow, a place that was absurdly grand and stuffy – and utterly desirable to Lydia. Try living in a drab airless attic, she had once scolded her friend Polly, and then see if the Ulysses Club holds any charm for you.

‘That’s why the police arrived at the club last night,’ she explained to Chang. ‘The loss was discovered before I could get out. So I had to hide the necklace.’ She was talking too fast. She made herself slow down. ‘I had to leave without it after we’d all been questioned and searched.’

She kept darting glances at Chang but his face remained smooth and unshocked. That was something, at least. Never before had she admitted any of her thefts to anyone, and they had been nowhere near the value of this necklace. She was nervous.

‘It was horrible,’ she added.

Despite the cumbersome bandage, he uncoiled from the grass with ease, sat up and leaned forward. ‘Where did you hide the necklace?’

Lydia swallowed. She had to trust him. Had to. ‘In the mouth of the stuffed bear outside the gentlemen’s cloakroom.’

Light seemed to leap from the surface of the river and fill his face. He laughed and the sound of it created a strange contentment in her chest.

‘You want me to get it back for you.’ His words were not a question.

‘Yes.’ She added a deep bow.

‘Why me? Why not you?’

‘I’m not allowed into the club. Last night was a special occasion. ’ In the silence that followed she felt the full weight of what she was asking.

‘I am not permitted to enter either,’ he reminded her. ‘No Chinese. So tell me how I am supposed to slip my hand into the bear’s mouth.’

‘That’s up to you. You’ve already proved you are… resourceful.’

‘You realise that if I’m caught, I will be imprisoned. Or worse.’

She closed her eyes. Sick of herself. ‘I know,’ she whispered.

‘Lydia.’

She opened her eyes and blinked, astonished. With no sound he had crossed the stretch of grass between them and was standing in front of her, tall and lithe and yet so still he barely seemed to breathe.

‘I could be executed,’ he said softly.

She threw back her hair and met his gaze. ‘Then don’t get caught.’

He laughed and she heard in it a wild rush of the energy that was usually so controlled in him. He touched her hand, the briefest brush of skin, but it was all it took to make her understand. He was like her. Danger made his blood flow faster. What others saw as risk, he saw as enticement. They were the mirror image of each other, two parts of the same whole, and that moment of skin against skin was the drawing together of the splintered pieces.

‘Chang An Lo,’ she said firmly, ‘make certain you are not caught.’ She tilted her head at him. ‘Because if you are, I won’t get my necklace.’

He smiled at her, his mouth gentle. ‘Is it so valuable?’

‘Yes. It’s made of rubies.’

‘I meant,’ he paused, studying her face, ‘is it so valuable to you?’

‘Of course. How else can I ever make a life, a proper life I mean, not this miserable scratching on the edge of survival? For me… and for my mother. She’s a pianist. How else can I buy her the Erard grand piano she craves?’

‘A piano?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’d risk everything… for a piano?’

Abruptly a chasm widened between their feet, so deep its bottom lay far out of sight in the shadows beneath. A chasm neither of them had even noticed was there.