The Concubine's Secret (3 page)

Her eyes widened and a blush started to creep up her cheek. ‘Why would anyone bother to remember all that? And who would come asking?’ Suddenly her tawny eyes were nervous. ‘Who, Alexei?’

He pushed his shoulders away from the door and only one half-pace took him to the bed where he sat down next to her. The mattress was bullet-hard and the three piles of coins tottered slightly in her lap.

She treated him to a surprised smile but her gaze was wary. ‘What?’

He leaned close, so close he could hear the whisper-soft clicking of her teeth behind the smooth curve of her cheek. ‘First of all, keep your voice down. The walls are paper-thin. That’s not just to save money on materials, they’re designed to be like that.’ His voice was the faintest trickle in her ear. ‘So everyone can eavesdrop on everybody else. A neighbour can report a muttered complaint about the cost of bread or about the incompetence of the rail system.’

She gave him that direct look again and rolled her eyes so dramatically he almost laughed out loud, but stifled it with a frown instead.

‘Damn it, listen to me, Lydia.’

She took his hand, scooped up one of the piles in her lap and dribbled twenty coins on to his palm.

‘I don’t want your money,’ he objected.

But she gently wrapped his fingers round the little heap, one by one.

‘Keep it,’ she whispered. ‘One day you may need it.’

Then she turned her face to him and kissed his cheek. Her lips felt feather-soft and warm on his skin. His throat tightened. It was the first time such an intimate gesture had passed between them. They’d known each other for eighteen months now, much of it unaware of the fact that they were brother and sister, and he’d even seen her stark naked that terrible day in the woods outside Junchow. But a kiss. No, never that.

He stood up awkwardly and flexed his legs. The room was suddenly claustrophobic, and silent except for the vibration of a woman snoring next door.

‘Lydia, I’m just trying to protect you.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why do you make everything so…?’

‘Difficult?’

‘Yes. So damn difficult. As if you prefer it that way.’

She shrugged and he studied her for a long moment, the mane of fiery hair that she refused to cut, the delicate heart-shaped face with candle-pale skin and the firm chin. She was seventeen years old, that’s all. He needed to make her understand, but he knew she had long ago learned to be stubborn, learned to be strong enough and difficult enough to deal with the hardships of her life. He knew that. Something in him wanted to reach out to her, to bridge the gap between them and touch her, to pat her shoulder or her undisciplined hair, to reassure her. But he was certain she wouldn’t welcome it, would regard it as pity.

Instead he said gently, ‘We have to work together, Lydia.’

But she didn’t look at him, didn’t answer.

Just a faint murmur escaped her lips and it struck him as a wretched and lonely sound. Alexei saw her eyes unfocused and her lips moving silently. She’d gone. Sometimes she did that. When things became too much she would disappear, leave him and float away into her own private world, somewhere in her head that brought her… what? Joy? Comfort? Escape from this dingy room and this dingy life?

Alexei’s back stiffened. He could guess where she’d gone. And with whom. Abruptly he opened the door to leave.

‘I’ll see you at the station tomorrow,’ he said in a brisk voice.

No reply.

He walked out and shut the door with a sharp click behind him.

Alexei stepped out into the gloomy corridor and stopped dead. Right in front of Lydia’s door loomed Liev Popkov, that crazy Cossack of hers. Alexei himself was tall and unused to looking up at people, but Popkov was considerably taller and as broadchested and bad-tempered as a water buffalo. Popkov didn’t back off. He was rooted to the scuffed floorboards, deliberately in Alexei’s way, huge arms folded across his chest so that he seemed to swell with every breath. He was chewing something vile that turned his teeth the colour of old leather.

‘Get out of my way,’ Alexei said quietly.

‘Leave her alone.’

Alexei gave him a long cool stare. ‘Leave who alone?’ ‘She’s young.’

‘She’s dangerous because she’s impetuous. She has to learn.’

‘Not from you.’

‘You let her take a risk tonight in that bar.’

‘
Nyet
. You are the danger. You, not her. You, with all your fancy talk and your aristocratic stiff neck. I tell you, each day that dawns in this land,
you
are the risk to us, not-’

‘You’re a brainless fool, Popkov.’

‘I’m here to protect her.’

‘You?’ Alexei dragged out the single word and gave the Cossack a slow, insulting smile.

‘
Da
.’ Popkov’s black curls were as unruly as his temper and sprang over the ragged scar that sliced across his forehead into the eyepatch. ‘
Da.
’ Popkov spat it out more vehemently, his breath escaping in a foul-smelling hiss. ‘Frighten her,’ he growled, ‘and I will rip your fucking balls off.’

Alexei’s eyes narrowed. He spoke softly. ‘Touch me and I’ll snap your windpipe before you even open your ignorant mouth to cry for help. Now tell me what she said to you.’

‘What?’

‘Tell me, ox brain, what she said to you when you were arm wrestling. What words, when you were dead in the water, did she whisper in your ear that made you find the strength to win?’

‘You’ll never know.’

Alexei dropped his voice to little more than a whisper. ‘Did she promise to fuck you, is that it?’

The big man bellowed.

A door slammed open. The sound of it cracking against a wall reverberated down the grey corridor, jerking both men’s attention off each other and on to the woman standing in the doorway next to Lydia’s. With hands planted firmly on her hips and feet wide apart, she was apparently unaware that her striped cotton nightshirt was unbuttoned to the waist, allowing an intimate, if partial, glimpse of the curves of her abundant breasts.

‘Shut up, you braying donkeys!’ she yelled at them. ‘I’m trying to sleep here and all I get is two oafs banging their heads together.’

Alexei took in her broad flat feet with toenails that seemed structured out of moose-horn, the loose hang of her stomach under the nightshirt, her tangled hair that might once have been a luxuriant brown but now had the colour and texture of last year’s hay bales. With an effort he kept his gaze firmly away from her breasts.

He gave a small stiff bow of his head. ‘My apologies.’

‘Piss on your apologies, comrade,’ she snapped. ‘Just let me get some sleep.’

Alexei glanced across at Popkov and nearly burst out laughing. The big bearded ox was standing there with his mouth gaping wide open, his one good eye focused without the slightest embarrassment on the pale half-moons on display. Little grunting noises escaped from his throat.

The woman was having none of it. Her dark eyebrows shot up and she darted forward, jabbing the Cossack in the stomach with a thick finger, not once but three times. Instantly Popkov recoiled, lurched back against the opposite wall as though prodded with a rifle butt, and Alexei took the opportunity to stride off down the corridor without another word. He needed some peace. Some quiet. Needed to think. Dear merciful God, protect me from the insanity of these peasants.

‘Breathe, my love, breathe.’

The voice was Chang An Lo’s, and it echoed as strong and clear in Lydia’s head as Junchow’s temple bell.

‘Don’t snatch at bites of air like a dog snatches at crumbs. You must learn to breathe with exactly the same concentration with which you learned to walk.’

She smiled, alone in her room, dumped the coins on the bed and rose to her feet, so that she could straighten her spine and lift her ribs out of their slump. She inhaled slowly, like pulling on a long reel of fishing line the way he’d taught her, so deep and so smooth that her skin prickled as the inrush of oxygen brought it to life.

‘Like just the thought of you, Chang An Lo, brings me to life.’

She’d had no idea it would be like this. This bad. Being parted from him, not knowing where he was or even whether he was still alive. No word of any kind. Five months and eleven days it had been. Of this. This agony. She’d known it would be hard but not that it would be this… unbearable. That she’d forget how to think, to breathe, to be. How could she still be Lydia Ivanova when all that was best in her was with him back there in China?

Chang had saved her life. It happened in the colourful old town of Junchow on the wide open plains of northern China. In an alleyway she’d got herself caught between an old man latched like a leech on to her wrist and a painted lady, both intent on kidnapping her, but Chang had come flying like a black-haired dragon through the air. And after that, she’d belonged to him utterly. It was as simple as that. Despite the anger and tears of those around them who fought to break them up, they had fallen in love. But now he was away from her and in the kind of danger she couldn’t bear to think about.

Oh my love, take care. Take great care. For my sake.

He was a Communist revolutionary fighting in Mao Tse Tung’s rebel Red Army in China, and time and again when she lay awake in the dark hours before dawn she brooded over whether she should be there at his side. Instead of traipsing across Russia, searching for a father she hadn’t seen since she was five years old. But she and Chang had agreed. It wasn’t possible. She would be as much a danger to him as one of Chiang Kai-shek’s bullets. If she were in China with him, she would always be his weak spot, distracting him, the pressure point his enemies could use.

No, my love; even though it was like watching blood flow from my own artery, I had to let you go.

Her fingers brushed the rose-coloured talisman he’d given her and she recalled the last time he came to her, standing tall and strong in the doorway of the old shed. His black hair tousled by the wind, an air of wildness about him, a grubby green blanket thrown over his shoulders in place of a coat. His eyes wanting her.

I must leave you here, the light of my soul, he’d said.
Leave you safe.

Safe? She started to prowl back and forth across the narrow space. What was the point of being safe, if it meant being without the one person who made her blood sing? Was that why she kept taking the risks that Alexei so hated? Poor Alexei, she knew she drove him mad at times. Her half-brother had been brought up as part of a privileged elite, first in the scented salons of Russia and then in China. He was used to order and discipline. Not this uncertainty, not this chaos. And it didn’t help that he and the Cossack loathed each other, while she was caught in the middle between them. It was Liev Popkov who had brought the news from Russia to Junchow, to her mother, Valentina; news that the husband she thought had died in 1917 during their escape as White Russians from the fury of the Bolsheviks was, in fact, alive in a prison camp.

How he had discovered this she never found out, but Lydia believed him implicitly. He’d helped her in China when she’d been searching for Chang An Lo in the dangerous docklands of Junchow. Popkov had protected her fiercely, throwing her money back at her when she’d offered it for his services as a bodyguard. It was only later when she learned that he – and his father before him – had been devoted servants to her grandfather in St Petersburg in the days of the Tsar that she understood. She felt a rush of affection for the big Cossack. His devotion touched her. Deeply. She trusted him, and that was something she valued above all else, it was so rare. Trust.

Can I trust Alexei?

Lydia shivered and moved over to the narrow window in her room where she stared out for a long time at the vast winter sky, watching the stars glitter in the darkness and lights shimmer in houses as the small town of Selyansk settled down for the night. Once again she felt the landscape of Russia slide into her heart, calming her and chiming with some image already deep inside her. She loved this country, loved its magnificent tortured soul. Just to have her feet stamping on Russian soil after the long absence in China satisfied some intense need that she hadn’t even realised was there.

Did Alexei feel it too? That need? She wasn’t sure. He was hard to read. But she was getting better at it, and even though he believed he kept his thoughts hidden behind that veil of indifference – using that rigid self-discipline of his that she both envied and loathed – she was learning to spot a faint rise of an eyebrow. Or a tightening of a cheek muscle. Or a fractional twitch of the lips when amused.

Oh yes, Alexei, you’re not as inscrutable as you would like. I hunt around inside you, sniffing out the secrets you try to hide. We may have the same father but our mothers were very different. Nor am I as blind as you think. You hated it when I kissed your cheek tonight, didn’t you? You couldn’t get out of this room fast enough. As if I’d bitten you. Don’t you want me as a sister? Is that it? Am I not what you would have wished for? Have I spilled too much of our aristocratic blood from my veins and filled them instead with the instincts of a wild alley cat, as my mother used to claim?

Though Lydia and Alexei had been living in the same town in China for many years, they had moved in very different circles and their paths had never crossed. It was only when her mother’s new fiancé had introduced her to the sophisticated glamour and bright lights of the elite society in Junchow that Lydia had met Alexei. In a French restaurant, she recalled. And she’d thought him arrogant and cold.

Yet he’d been generous with his help when she needed it, and after her mother’s death only a few months ago she’d learned the truth in a letter Valentina had left for her. That Alexei’s mother might be the wealthy Countess Serova, but his father was Jens Friis, the Danish engineer. The affair happened in St Petersburg long before he married Valentina, but Alexei had been as shocked as Lydia herself by the discovery that they were related. She knew it had shaken his world as much as it had shaken hers. Both had been an only child until that point, dealing with the loneliness in their own different ways, but now… She conjured up the image of his straight back, his neat brown hair and controlled smile… Now she had a brother. One who was as committed to finding their father as she was.