The Russian Concubine

24

Lydia was determined to enjoy the evening. Her first soirée. It was held in one of the big villas in the avenue that formed the border between the Russian and British Quarters, where Lydia sometimes came to admire what a pocketful of tsarist jewellery had bought for the few lucky ones. But tonight the music only made her feel worse. It flowed like floodwater under her defences and loosened everything inside her. Her words to her mother and her fears for Chang jostled inside her head until she couldn’t think straight.

The piece was a romantic extract from Prince Igor by Borodin, one of the Russian mogutchaya kutchka, played well enough but not as well as her mother would have performed it. Lydia concentrated on the pianist’s fingers, caressing the keys the way her own fingers caressed her rabbit’s fur. Intimate and needy.

‘Now we dance,’ Mrs Zarya declared, ‘before someone starts to sing one of the sad Georgian laments.’

The rows of chairs were swept aside to the edges of the ballroom and couples began to take to the floor. Mrs Zarya sat herself down heavily next to Lydia against the wall, rustling her voluminous taffeta evening dress. It smelled seriously of mothballs and had a tiny mend in one sleeve that was probably where she’d caught it on something, but Lydia toyed with the idea that it might be a bullet hole from a Bolshevik rifle.

‘You enjoy so far?’ Mrs Zarya asked.

‘Very much. Spasibo.’

‘Excellent. Otlichno!’

Oddly, it was the hour of poetry reading at the beginning of the evening that Lydia liked best. She hadn’t understood a word of it, of course, but that didn’t matter. It was the sounds. The voice of Russia. The full-bodied vowels and complicated combinations that rolled around the speakers’ mouths and somehow seemed to resonate. Her ears found a strange satisfaction in them. That surprised her.

‘I liked the poetry,’ she said, ‘and I like the chandeliers.’

Mrs Zarya laughed and patted her hand. ‘Of course you do, little sparrow.’ Her large bosom quivered with amusement.

‘Do you think someone will ask me to dance?’ Lydia’s eyes followed the swirling dancers enviously. She didn’t care who asked. Even one of the old men with the tsarist medals on their chests and the sadness in their eyes, just as long as it was someone. Someone male.

‘Nyet. No. Of course you cannot dance.’

‘Oh, but I can, I’m good at it. I know…’

‘No. Nyet.’ Mrs Zarya tapped Lydia’s knee sharply with her folded fan. ‘You are too young. It would not be fitting. A child, you are. A child does not dance with a man.’

At that moment General Manlikov, a square and impressive figure with curly white hair and a very upright way of walking, bowed to them both and offered his arm to Mrs Zarya. She inclined her head and accompanied him onto the dance floor. Lydia watched. It annoyed her to be called a child, but most of the fifty or more people here were old, some well dressed, others showing signs of patch and mend like Mrs Zarya, and all bound together by the same consciousness of class and country. They were in a grand ballroom with tall gilt mirrors ranging all the way down one long wall and elegantly arched windows on the other, opening onto what looked like a terrace and gardens. It was dark out there, moonless and godless. But the bright lights and laughter in the ballroom made Lydia bold.

She rose and stood in the doorway of the French windows, staring out into the blackness. Nothing moved. Not even a bat or a branch. She could see no one, but that didn’t mean they could-n’t see her. Nevertheless she stepped out on the terrace and started to dance, a Chopin waltz floating softly through the open windows. The damp air felt cool on her cheeks and her bare arms shivered with secret pleasure as she spun and swayed on her own to the music. For one inward moment everything else was washed away, leaving her head clear and clean at last.

‘How quaint.’

She stopped and swung around. A young man in his early twenties was leaning languorously against the door frame, observing her. Slowly and deliberately he started to applaud. It was almost an insult.

‘Enchanting.’

‘It is impolite to spy on a person,’ Lydia said sharply.

He shrugged indifferently. ‘I had no idea this terrace was reserved for just you.’

‘You should have made your presence known.’

‘The dancing display was too… entertaining.’ He spoke English with a slight Russian accent and his mouth curled up at one side.

‘General Manlikov’s entertainment is provided in the ballroom, not out here. A gentleman would respect a lady’s privacy.’ It was meant to be cutting, the way Valentina sometimes spoke to Antoine.

He drew a silver cigar case from his breast pocket, took his time lighting a cheroot, first tapping its end on the back of the case, and then regarded her with a lazy mocking expression. He clicked his heels together and tipped his head in a curt bow.

‘I apologise for not being a gentleman, Miss Ivanova.’

The fact that he knew her name came as a shock. ‘Have we met?’ she demanded.

But as the words came out of her mouth, she realised who she was talking to. It was Alexei Serov, the son of Countess Natalia Serova. She barely recognised him now. Except for his manner. That was as haughty as ever. But his thick brown hair had been cropped very short and he was wearing an elegant white evening jacket with finely tapered black trousers that emphasised his long limbs. He looked every inch the son of a Russian count.

‘I seem to remember we were introduced in a restaurant. La Licorne, I do believe.’

‘I don’t recall,’ she said in an offhand manner and moved away from him to lean against the stone balustrade that edged the terrace. ‘I’m surprised you do.’

‘As if I could forget that dress.’

‘I like this dress.’

‘Clearly.’

The music ceased and suddenly the night air was full of silence. She made no effort to break it. Faintly she could smell wood smoke mingling with the aroma of his tobacco. It struck her as a very male smell. It made her think of Chang. Not that he smelled of smoke; no, his was more of a clean river smell, or was it of the sea? For a brief second she wondered if his skin would taste salty on her tongue, and instantly felt herself blush, which irritated her.

‘You’re the Russian girl who doesn’t know how to speak Russian, aren’t you?’ said Alexei Serov.

‘And you’re the Russian who doesn’t know how to speak English politely.’

Their eyes fixed on each other and she became aware that his were green and very intense, despite the air of casual indifference he assumed.

‘The music was excellent,’ he commented.

‘Rather average, I thought. The bass was too heavy and the tempo uneven.’

His mouth curved again in that arrogant way of his. ‘I bow to your superior knowledge.’

She felt the urge to demonstrate that she knew more of the world than just music. ‘It is peaceful here now in the International Settlement for pleasant soirées like this.’ She gestured toward the brightly lit room. ‘But everything in China is changing.’

‘Do enlighten me, Miss Ivanova.’

‘The Communists are demanding equality for workers instead of feudalism, and a fair distribution of land.’

‘Forget the Communists.’ He said it dismissively. ‘They will be stamped out within the next few weeks. Right here in Junchow.’

‘No, you’re wrong. They’re…’

‘They are finished. General Chiang Kai-shek has ordered an elite division of his Kuomintang troops to be sent here to rid us of their flea bites. So you are quite safe with your soirées, don’t worry.’

‘I’m not worried.’

But she was.

Suddenly a quickstep struck up in the ballroom, a surge of music full of life and energy.

On impulse Lydia said, ‘Would you like to dance?’

‘With you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Out here?’

‘Yes.’

His face looked as if she’d just asked him to jump into the honey wagon. ‘I think not. You are too young.’

She was stung. ‘Or is it that you are too old?’ she retorted and started to dance on her own again as if oblivious to his presence.

Round and round in dizzying circles, but it annoyed her that Alexei Serov didn’t have the courtesy to leave. She kept her eyes half closed and would not look at him, blanking him out and letting Chang take her into his arms instead, as she floated on the faint breeze and her body swayed and twirled from one end of the terrace to the other. The rhythm of the music seemed to beat inside her blood. Her breath came fast and she could feel her skin so alive it seemed to be aware of every touch of the night dew and each shiver of a moth’s wings as it fluttered toward the circle of light.

‘Ya tebya iskala, Alexei.’

Lydia stopped, her mind still spinning. A young woman was standing beside Alexei Serov, holding a glass of red wine in each hand and speaking words Lydia could not understand. Her straight blond hair was shaped into a neat corn-coloured cap and she wore a modern dress that stopped just below the knee like Lydia’s own, but this young woman’s was beaded all over in vivid blues, a Paris dress, a fashion-house dress. It emphasised the blue of her eyes, which right now were focused with surprise on Lydia. The moment was over. Lydia treated the pair to what was meant to be a gracious nod of the head and walked past them with chin high. They were murmuring to each other in Russian but as Lydia re-entered the ballroom, she heard Alexei Serov slip deliberately into English.

‘That girl is just like her father. He had a temper too. I once saw him throw his violin on the fire because he could not get the note he wanted from it.’

Lydia’s ears were burning. But she kept walking.

Chang An Lo watched her. From the damp darkness of a sprawling weeping willow tree. Watched her on the terrace the way he would a long-tailed swallow, swooping and diving through the sky for the pure joy of it. The air around her seemed to vibrate and her hair set the night on fire. He could feel its heat and hear the crackle of its flames.

He breathed lightly and felt a sharp unmistakable flicker of anger rise up in him. The dance and the music were strange to his senses, but Lydia Ivanova’s actions were clear. She was moving the way a young female cat moves in front of a likely male when she’s ready to mate, swaying and seductive, seeking out his advances, rubbing and purring and twitching her flanks.

The man was acting uninterested, his body soft and boneless in the strip of yellow light from the window, but he didn’t leave. His eyes hooked into the dancing girl in such a way that it made Chang want to skewer him on the tip of a fishing spear and watch him writhe. It was not only the Black Snakes that slithered toward her. The boneless man’s hands forgot to smoke the cheroot between his fingers, but his half-closed eyes did not forget to watch each graceful dip and rise of her hips. He stayed there.

Like the shadow stayed. The one by the steps up to the terrace, the one merging with the bulk of a water butt, deeper black against black. The one whose breath would end. A gleam from a window glinted on the metal of a shuriken in a poised hand.

Chang drew his knife. He watched over her.