The Concubine's Secret (6 page)

Yet here was a train carrying troops and arms from Russia to Chiang Kai-shek’s overstretched Nationalist Army, who were sworn enemies of the Chinese Communists. It didn’t make sense, whichever way Chang turned it. Like a dog humping a goose, it wouldn’t fit together. He frowned, feeling a sudden unease, but nothing could dampen his companion’s delight.

‘Rifles,’ Luo crowed. He scooped one out of a box and ran a hand down its length, lovingly, the way he would a woman’s thigh. ‘Beautiful well-oiled little whores. Hundreds of them.’

‘This winter,’ Chang said with a grin for his friend, ‘the training camps in Hunan Province will be stocked as tight as rice in a
tu-hao’s belly.’

‘Chou En-lai will be more than satisfied. It’ll do us no harm either to be the ones to bring him such a harvest.’

Chang nodded, but his thoughts were chasing each other.

‘Chou En-lai is a genius,’ Luo added loyally. ‘He organises our Red Army with an inspired mind.’ He lifted the rifle and sighted down its barrel. ‘You’ve met him, haven’t you, Chang?’

‘Yes, x
ie xie
, I had that privilege. In Shanghai, while I was attached to the Intelligence Office.’

‘Tell us what the great man is like?’

Chang knew Luo wanted big words from him, but he could not find them on his tongue, not for Chou En-lai, the leader of the Party Headquarters in Shanghai.

‘He has the charm of a silk glove,’ he murmured instead. ‘It slides over your skin and holds you firmly in his grasp. A thin, handsome face with spectacles that he uses to cover his… thoughtful eyes.’

Slavish eyes. Slavish yet ruthless. A man who would do anything – anything at all, however brutal to others or demeaning to himself – for his masters. And his masters were in Moscow. But Chang said none of this.

Instead he added, ‘He’s like you, Luo. He has a mouth as big as a hippo’s and likes to talk a lot. His speeches run on for hours.’ He banged a hand down on one of the boxes. ‘Now let’s get these loaded on the pack animals before-’

A sudden explosion silenced his words. A dull thud outside that rattled the boards of the wagon. It came from somewhere close and both men reacted instantly, springing from the wagon, pistols in their hands. But the moment they hit the ground, feet scrabbling for grip on the ice, they halted – because immediately ahead of them, lying helplessly on its back among the rocks like an upturned turtle, was a tall metal safe. Its door had just been blown off and around it huddled an excited group of Luo’s troops.

‘Wang!’ Luo barked out to his second in command. ‘What in the name of a monkey’s blue arse are you doing?’

Wang was a stocky young man with thick eyebrows and a short bull neck that angled forward, making him look as though he were always just about to launch into a charge. He broke free from the group and marched over to his senior commander with a fistful of papers extended in front of him.

‘The safe came crashing out of that carriage.’ He pointed to a mound of mangled metal.

The leading carriage had borne the brunt of the first explosion that derailed the train. It had twisted upside down on the valley floor and emptied its contents – uniformed officers and a dark green safe – across the rocky surface, before lurching into a tangled heap that crushed whatever or whoever was left inside it.

Respectfully, but with a triumphant spark in his eyes, Wang held out his fist. ‘I took the liberty of removing its door.’

Chang An Lo seized the sheaf of papers from the soldier’s hand. His eyes skimmed the first page and abruptly the world seemed to slow down around him. Soldiers were still moving, herding their prisoners into battered lines, but it was as if they had lead weights in their boots, each step a slow effortful blur on the edge of Chang’s vision. He tightened his grip on the papers.

‘You were right,’ Luo Wen-cai growled. ‘There were documents on board.’

Chang nodded. He stepped forward, lithe as one of the mountain leopards, and seized the front of Wang’s jacket in his fist. The second in command’s eyes widened and his head sank further into his shoulders.

‘Did you read them?’ Chang demanded.

‘No, sir.’

‘Do you swear? On the word of your ancestors?’ The jacket was ready to tear.

‘I swear.’

A heartbeat. That’s all. And a knife would have slid between the tendons of Wang’s throat. He saw it in Chang’s black eyes.

‘I can’t read,’ the soldier whispered, his voice barely scratching the air. ‘I never learned.’

Two more heartbeats. Then Chang nodded and pushed the man away.

‘So,’ Luo said quietly, ‘your intelligence information was accurate. The train was carrying more than just military personnel to the Nationalists.’ He directed a scarred forefinger at the gaping mouth of the safe. ‘Look.’

Chang moved across the rocky terrain, his eyes no longer seeing the shattered bodies that criss-crossed his path. In the back of the safe, solid enough to remain undisturbed by the explosion that blew off the door, lay three burlap bags. He reached in and lifted one. It was heavy enough to strain the muscles of his forearm, and on the outside of it in dark brown ink was a string of words stamped in Russian Cyrillic script.

Chang shook the bag and heard its metallic clink. He knew what was inside without even looking. It was good Russian gold.

‘Tell me, Alexei, what do you remember?’

Lydia tried to keep the hunger out of her voice as she asked the question, but it was hard. The train had stopped. It felt strange to be standing here with her brother, in the middle of the night and the middle of nowhere, under a dark and starless Russian sky. But anything was better than remaining cooped up in that compartment for hour after hour. The novelty of train travel had worn off long ago, all that initial excitement and sense of discovery had been buried under a mountain of delays and disappointment. No, not disappointment exactly. Lydia shook her head and pulled her hat down tightly in a useless attempt to keep out the cold that crept relentlessly under her skin. She stamped her boots on the icy gravel and felt her blood rush briefly into her toes.

No, not disappointment. That was the wrong word. Carefully she sifted through her newly acquired Russian vocabulary and came up with
dosada instead. Frustration.
That was it.
Dosada. It was new to her.

‘I wondered when you’d ask,’ Alexei said quietly. ‘It’s taken you a long time.’

There was something in his voice, something that dragged at the words.

‘I’m asking now,’ she said. ‘What do you remember?’

In the darkness she couldn’t make out his expression but she sensed a tension in the way he shifted his shoulders, as though something tight was rubbing against them. Something he wanted to be rid of. Was it her? Did she rub and fret and cause him pain?

Blackness had swallowed the landscape around them, so that Lydia had no idea whether mountains hunched over them or flat open plains spread ahead. Somewhere she could hear the murmur of a river. Several other passengers had climbed down from the carriages to stretch their legs while the train took on water, but their voices were muted. Lydia ducked her head against the wind and in doing so caught sight of Alexei’s gloved fingers down by his side, clenching and straightening, clenching and straightening. When she’d asked
What do you remember?
she hadn’t specified which memories, but she didn’t need to. They both knew. Yet now, staring at his fingers, it occurred to her for the first time that maybe he had no wish to share his memories of Jens Friis. Not with her.

Was that space in his head where his father lived too intimate? Too private?

She waited, aware of the shouts of the rail workers calling to each other as they swung the spindly arm back against the metal water tower on its thin, spidery legs. A lamp hung from a high wire above it and was swaying in the wind, sending shadows like ghosts skittering around their feet. She shifted her boots carefully to avoid stepping on them. Specks of soot were landing on her skin, soft as tiny black-winged moths. Or were they night spirits, the ones Chang had warned her about?

‘For months,’ she said, ‘we’ve been travelling together, yet never have we talked about our memories of Jens Friis. Not really discussed them, I mean. Not even when we were stranded for three weeks in Omsk.’

‘No,’ Alexei agreed, ‘not even then.’

‘I wasn’t…’ She hesitated, uncertain how to explain to him. ‘I wasn’t ready.’

A pause. The sides of the engine seemed to heave, sighing as it released its hot breath. Lydia brushed the soot from her cheek, while out of the darkness Alexei’s voice came to her with a gentleness she wasn’t used to.

‘Because your Russian wasn’t good enough?’

‘Yes,’ she lied.

‘I wondered.’

‘Tell me now.’

He took a deep breath, as if about to plunge under water. What was it he feared down there? What dangerous current from his past? She let her glove brush his sleeve, and at that moment on this icy scrap of dirt in the middle of this land that was theirs, yet not theirs, she had never felt closer to her brother. She felt something melt as her glove touched his sleeve, fusing them so tightly that she experienced a curl of surprise that her hand could move away from him without effort.

‘He used to visit,’ Alexei started quietly. ‘Jens Friis. In St Petersburg. My mother and I lived with her husband, Count Serov – the man I always believed was my father – in a grand mansion with a long gravelled drive. I’d watch for Jens from the upstairs salon window – it gave the best view of the approach.’

‘Did he come often?’

‘Every Saturday afternoon. I never questioned why he came so regularly. Or why he always made such a fuss of me. Sometimes he brought me presents.’

‘What kind?’

‘Oh,’ he let his hand drift casually through the freezing air, ‘stamps for my stamp album or a new model for me to build.’

‘Model of what?’

‘A ship. A wooden schooner to sail to the Far East. But sometimes he would cover my eyes, spin me round and present me with a book.’

‘What kind of book?’

‘Poetry. He liked Pushkin’s poetry. Or Russian folk tales. Though he was Danish, he was keen for me to know my Russian heritage.’

She nodded.

‘So I’d rush over to the window seat,’ his voice was growing warm with the memories, ‘whenever Mama told me Jens Friis was coming to visit, and I’d crouch there, ready to jump up and wave to him.’ A self-conscious laugh pushed its way between the words. ‘Just a small boy at one of thirty or more windows.’

‘But did he see you when he came up the drive?’

‘
Da
, always. He would lift his hat to me and sweep it through the air with a great flourish to make me laugh.’

‘In a carriage?’

‘Sometimes, yes. But more often he was astride his horse.’

His horse.

A memory came rushing into Lydia’s head from nowhere, barging its way through the thin bones of her skull. A horse. A magnificent high-stepping chestnut with a black mane which she used to hang on to with stubby fingers. A horse that smelled of musty oil and sweet oats, a horse called…

‘Hero,’ she said. ‘
Geroi.’

Alexei’s face was suddenly closer to hers and she could smell tobacco on him. ‘You remember Hero too?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I loved his ears.’

‘His ears?’

‘The way they twitched and pricked when he was happy. Or flattened when he was irritable. I thought they were so magically expressive. I wanted ears like that.’

She could hear, rather than see, Alexei’s smile in the darkness. ‘Jens used to take me riding. I would perch like a monkey in front of him on Hero’s saddle, and later when I was big enough to have a pony of my own, we’d go off for the afternoon together, just the two of us.’

A small sound escaped Lydia.

‘We’d ride out along the banks of the Neva River.’ Alexei was speaking to her but she could tell that he’d slipped far away. ‘We’d canter all the way to the woods.’

We. Always this
we.

‘We used to laugh a lot on those days out. I especially loved it in the autumn when the trees were so full of burning colour it was as if they were on fire. Until one day – I must have been seven years old – he stood me in front of him like a stiff little soldier, holding my arms to my sides, and told me he couldn’t visit me every Saturday any more.’

Lydia listened to the silences that stretched between the words. They both could guess the reason for the abrupt change in Jens’ routine, but Alexei was the one who voiced it.

‘He must have become involved with your mother, Valentina. Obviously he had to stop seeing my mother.’

‘Was that the last you saw of him?’

‘No. For a whole year I lost him and I had no idea why. I’d heard him quarrel with my mother behind closed doors, so for a long time I blamed her. But without warning he came back.’

Lydia stared at Alexei, surprised.

‘Don’t look so shocked,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t often. He came for birthdays and for Christmas sleigh rides. And an occasional canter through the forest again. That’s all.’

‘What did you call him?’

‘I called him
dyadya
. Uncle
. Uncle Jens.’

Lydia said nothing.

‘He taught me to jump. First the boughs on the forest floor, I’d pop over them on my pony, no trouble, but then he put me to bigger obstacles, the fences and streams.’ Alexei tipped his head back and she saw a ripple of something flow up the line of his throat. ‘He used to roar with laughter whenever I fell off and sometimes…’ he gave a chuckle deep in his chest, ‘I used to tumble out of the saddle just to hear that sound.’

Lydia could see them. A boy. His green eyes alight with excitement. His red-haired father leading the way on the chestnut horse, the sun low in the sky, painting them both golden. Leaves forming a bright brittle carpet under the hooves.