The Concubine's Secret

17

Alexei woke in total darkness. The timbers creaked around him and he could hear the slap of the waves on the bow.

‘Konstantin!’

He heard movement in the cabin.

‘What is it, my friend? Wait while I strike a match.’

A flame flared and a lamp hissed. In the sudden gleam of yellow light Alexei focused on the jumble of blankets on the floor and realised it was Konstantin’s own bed he had usurped. The boatman was naked, his long back well muscled, blond curls on his thighs. He turned and studied Alexei, unabashed by his own nakedness, his blue eyes still heavy with sleep.

‘What is it, Alexei? A nightmare?’

‘No. Where is my moneybelt, Konstantin?’

The long eyelashes blinked. ‘Moneybelt? What moneybelt?’

‘I was wearing one when-’

‘My friend, I am no thief.’

‘I’m not accusing you.’

‘That’s what it sounds like to me.’ He spread his broad hands as if to show there was nothing hiding in them. ‘When I dragged you out of the water, you were in a mess. Bleeding over everything, your clothes cut and torn, but there was definitely no moneybelt.’ He chuckled softly. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t have noticed?’

Alexei collapsed back on the pillow and closed his eyes. ‘I apologise, Konstantin. Please go back to sleep.’

Immediately the light went out. Alexei heard his companion’s bare feet pad across the boards, felt a hand touch his hair in the darkness and slide gently down to brush the skin of his neck.

‘How old are you, Alexei?’ Konstantin’s voice was a whisper.

‘Twenty-six.’

‘So young. And so… untouchable.’

A silence, black and sticky as pitch, dropped into the gap between the two men. Alexei rolled on to his side, turning his back on the boatman, so that the hand fell away. ‘Goodnight, comrade. Dobri nochi, tovarishch.’

Quietly the footsteps padded away.

Everything was gone. The money, the jewels, all that he had secreted away from prying eyes. How they must have laughed at his naivety.

Alexei felt bile rise in his throat because he knew it wasn’t his naivety that had caused this. It was his own blind arrogance. He’d known what to expect, what Mikhail Vushnev was likely to try on that freezing cold night on the bridge. But he had been so confident that he could handle whatever a dumb camp apparatchik thought up and still extract the information he needed.

How wrong could he be? How unforgivable was the mistake?

He forced his eyes closed. But the images remained there under his eyelids, etched sharper than acid into his brain. Everything of real value was gone. Everything.

Beads of sunlight threaded their way through a line of holes in the curtain that hung across the small cabin porthole. Bright tears of regret. That’s what they looked like to Alexei when he opened his eyes and saw them spilling over his blanket and on to the table. The sun had scarcely climbed above the eastern horizon, the dawn light still drifting lazily down the surface of the river, in no hurry to get anywhere.

But I am. In a hurry to get back to Felanka.

Alexei threw off the blankets and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His head threatened to split wide open when he pushed himself to his feet and nausea hit. Stale, fevered breath escaped from his lungs in a rush. He swore. Swaying dangerously he fought to catch his breath, and that was when he saw Konstantin watching him in silence from his nest of blankets on the floor.

‘You’re weak as a kitten,’ the boatman said. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Time to leave.’

‘Nyet.’ It came out as a soft moan. ‘Not yet. You are not well enough.’

‘I have to go.’

Alexei straightened up. The boards were cold under his feet and he looked around the cabin for his boots. They were by a bucket in a corner and had been polished. He shuffled over, picked them up and put them on. The effort left him trembling. Konstantin said nothing.

‘My clothes?’ Alexei asked.

‘I told you, they were torn to rags so I threw them away. You can keep my old ones that you’re wearing and your coat is in that cupboard.’

Alexei retrieved it. The heavy material had one long cut down the front that had been meticulously mended.

‘How can I thank you?’

Konstantin wrapped himself tightly in his blankets. ‘There’s bread and some cold pork in the-’

‘No. But thank you. You’ve done more than enough for me already.’

‘I have no money to offer you.’

‘A knife is all I need.’

A brief nod of the head towards a cupboard. Alexei chose the sharpest and thinnest blade, then approached his rescuer and held out his hand in farewell.

‘Thank you, Konstantin. Spasibo. You have been a true friend.’ He felt an urge to say more than just spasibo. ‘I am more grateful than I can say for what…’

‘Not grateful enough, it seems.’ The blue eyes closed. ‘Just go.’

Alexei bent down, squeezed his shoulder and left.

Popkov swore at her. It came as a shock to Lydia.

He started cursing the moment she stepped off the train in Felanka. She hurried down the icy platform towards him but he just stood there without moving, swearing at her in his booming voice. He loomed big and bulky, a bear on its hind legs, so black-eyed and dangerous that other passengers on the station platform swerved to avoid him. His hat was missing so that his greasy curls launched out at angry angles, and his black eyepatch lay askew where he’d been picking at it.

How many times had he waited here for her?

How many trains had he met?

How many hours had he wasted in the snow and the rain?

‘Liev!’ she called out and started to run, her coat catching at her legs.

The Cossack bunched up his massive eyebrows and scowled harder at her, looking ready to kill something, and as she drew near she heard his hot words clearly in the chill air.

‘Fuck you, suka! Where have you been? Why the devil did you leave without me? Why? You stupid little chit, you could be lying in fucking shit in a gutter somewhere by now or-’

‘Hush,’ she murmured and stood still in front of him. ‘Hush.’ She looked up into his face with a wide, affectionate smile.

His black eye glittered at her. ‘Damn you,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘I probably will.’

‘You stupid little fool.’ His big paw landed on her shoulder, crushing it.

He’d never sworn at her before. Never. That’s how bad it was for him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her words almost lost in the great sigh of the steam engine as it belched out smoke.

She stood close to him. Slid her arms around his chest as far as they would go and laid her cheek on his stinking coat. The bristles of his beard prickled her forehead as he kissed the top of her head. His huge arms wrapped around her, grinding her slender frame against his ribs till she couldn’t breathe. She could hear him swallow, over and over again.

‘Put him down,’ a woman’s voice chuckled just behind Lydia. ‘Stop mauling him. That Cossack is mine.’

It was Elena.

Alexei pushed the tip of his knife into the bottom of his boot and twisted. Nothing happened.

Chyort! He was too damn weak even to flick the heel off a shoe. He dropped the knife and sank down with relief on the rain-soaked grass, indifferent to the chill and the wet creeping through his coat. Since leaving the boat he’d walked north through the flatlands, following the line of the river, forcing his legs to march hour after hour. Only now did he allow himself to collapse on to the riverbank.

He was drenched in sweat, despite the bitter wind that skidded off the surface of the water. Flecks of ice in the air nicked at his skin like minuscule ice picks. His mouth was dry as sand and his hands shaking. Up ahead appeared a village, its wooden cottages breathing out coils of smoke from metal chimney pipes, and the smell of cooked meat swirled on the wind. He needed money. Without it he wasn’t going to get far, which was why he was now hacking at his boot in an attempt to remove the heel.

Under a steel grey sky he rested his cheek on the grass to cool the fire that was raging under his skin. Oh Lydia. Damn it, just wait. Be patient. I’m coming back, I promise. He felt again the sudden rush of shame. He’d let her down. He forced himself upright and started in with the knife once more. He’d lost the moneybelt to that Felanka bastard, but safe inside the heel of each boot lay a neat roll of white rouble notes. Not much maybe, but enough to get him back to Felanka and to…

The heel popped off, hanging on by just one cobbler’s pin. Inside the gap he had specially created lay nothing. It was empty. Alexei stared at it. Shook the boot ferociously as if the money would materialise from some other hole. He snatched up the other boot and with one angry jab jerked the heel on to the grass. Empty. He didn’t even bother to shake it this time.

Cold despair slid into his gut. He tried to think straight. The coat? He twisted out of it and sliced the knife into the hem, into the collar, into the cuffs. All empty. All gone. No roubles, no silver dollars. No hope of buying his father’s freedom.

He bent to one side and vomited last night’s fish on to the grass.

‘Oh Konstantin, you bastard, you thieving fucking bastard. You…’

Rage robbed him of words. He knew it was over. He lifted the knife. Without hesitation he cut through the material of his trousers and stabbed the blade into the spot high on his thigh where there was already a rough scar. A flow of blood spilled down over the pale muscle to form a pool on the grass. Using the knife tip he extracted something small and hard, covered in blood, from within the flesh and put it into his mouth. When he spat it out on to his palm, it was clean. A diamond. Too small to be worth much. Even less in a dog-shit place like this. But hopefully enough to get him to Felanka.

It was the last. There was nothing left after this.

He cut a strip off the bandage on his side and knotted it tightly round his thigh. Blood still oozed, but Alexei ignored it. He welcomed the pain in the wound at each step. It deadened that other pain, the one in his chest, the one that was trying to suffocate him as he limped into the village.

‘1908?’

‘Yes, that’s what it said. The stones spelled out Nyet and 1908.’ Lydia frowned and turned to Elena. ‘I don’t understand what it means. What happened in 1908?’

On the train back to Felanka she had cudgelled her brain into trying to work out the significance of the number. 1908. But however meticulously she trawled through her knowledge of Russian history, nothing came to mind that made the slightest bit of sense.

‘1908?’ Elena asked again. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t 1905? That’s when the first revolution started in St Petersburg with the Bloody Sunday massacre. Maybe it’s telling you he’s in St Petersburg.’

‘No, it was definitely an eight, not a five. I’m sure of it. 1908.’

They were walking back from the station and had stopped at a roadside stall which sold hot pirozhki to passers-by. Lydia was holding her hands out to the heat of the brazier, eyeing Popkov’s broad uncommunicative back as he waited for the little pies to be fried. Since leaving the station he hadn’t spoken to her. She stamped her feet on the hard compacted snow, frustrated by his silence and by the cryptic message from the camp. She rubbed her gloves together hard to bring blood to her fingers and turned to Elena. ‘The Tunguska event happened in 1908, didn’t it, the comet that exploded over Siberia?’

‘Da, but I don’t see a connection.’

‘Neither do I, except that it flattened millions of trees, just like the prisoners are doing.’ She looked at the older woman hopefully. ‘I thought you might think of something.’

Elena shook her head regretfully. ‘Yet it must be obvious or they wouldn’t have left you that message. Can you think of any connection to yourself?’

‘No, it’s four years before I was born.’

‘And your parents?’

‘They weren’t married then, but they both lived in St Petersburg. Do you think it’s referring to something that happened in St Petersburg that year?’

‘Like what?’

They stared at each other blankly and shook their heads.

Popkov took a bite out of one of the pirozhki and breathed hot air at the two women as he thrust a pie at each of them.

‘It’s not a date,’ he growled and turned to the pie seller for more.

‘What?’ Lydia demanded.

‘You heard.’

She prodded his back. ‘What do you mean, it’s not a date?’

He shovelled another pie into his mouth. How could he do that without burning his tongue?

‘How do you know it’s not a date?’

Popkov lumbered round to face her and she could still feel his anger at her, bristling on his clothes and lurking in his thick shaggy beard. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, to promise she wouldn’t stray again. But she couldn’t do it.

‘Tell me, Liev,’ she said softly, ‘if 1908 isn’t a date, what is it?’

He glared at her and plucked at his eyepatch with a greasy finger. ‘When the prison guards are drunk, they blurt out things. I’ve heard from several of them about the places so secret the authorities don’t give them names, just numbers. 1908 is one of them. I’ve heard it mentioned.’

‘So what is it?’

‘It’s a secret prison.’

‘A secret prison?’ The bones in Lydia’s face seemed to freeze.

‘Da. I have no idea where, except that it’s somewhere in Moscow.’

Lydia seized the front of his coat and hugged it to her. ‘Then that’s where we’ll go. To Moscow.’