Kate Furnivall: The Concubine's Secret

Alexei Serov. Her half-brother.

They shared a father, if it could be called sharing. Which Lydia doubted.

His brown hair was swept back from his face, emphasising the arrogant forehead inherited from his aristocratic Russian mother, the Countess Serova. But his fierce green eyes came straight from the Viking father Lydia could only dimly remember. Jens Friis was their father’s name, a Danish surname neither of them bore. Jens had worked as an engineer until 1917 for the last Tsar of Russia, Nikolas II, and now, more than twelve years later, he was the reason that she and Alexei had spent months travelling with the unruly Popkov in tow, all the way through the mountains of China to this godforsaken dead-and-alive hole in Russia.

A shout dragged her attention back to where it should have been, and her young stomach swooped with a sudden flutter of panic. Popkov was losing. Not just pretend losing. Really losing.

She felt sick. Coins were pouring into the grubby green kerchief on the bar where the bets were held, and all of them were now against Popkov. That was exactly what she and he had planned, but she’d left too late her signal to him to start fighting back. The black hairs on his burly forearm were only a hand’s breadth from the surface of the table as his opponent forced him down, and the bulging muscle started to twitch and shake.

No, Popkov, no.

Damn it, how could she have left it so late? She knew he would see his arm break before he’d allow it to collapse in defeat.

‘God damn you, Popkov,’ she yelled at the top of her lungs, ‘are you some kind of babushka or what? Put a bit of effort into it, will you?’

She saw his teeth flash, his shoulder swell. His fist lifted a fraction, though he never took his one good eye off his opponent’s face.

‘He’s done for!’ someone shouted.

‘ Da , I’ll drink well tonight.’ Raucous laughter.

‘Finish the job. You’ve got him-’

Sweat dripped on to the stained table and the dog in the corner barked in time to their rapid heartbeats until someone slapped it down. Lydia elbowed a path through the crush of bodies to stand right behind Popkov, desperately rubbing her own right forearm as if by doing so she could rub fresh life into Popkov’s tearing muscle.

She couldn’t let him lose. Couldn’t.

To hell with the money.

Up on the landing Alexei Serov lit a black cheroot and flipped the dead match down on the drinkers below.

The girl was impossible. Didn’t she realise what she was doing?

He narrowed his eyes against the pall of smoke that clung to his hair and his skin like dead men’s breath. There were probably thirty men down there in the bar, plus a handful of women in dark dreary clothing, heavy grey skirts and brown shawls. That was one of the things he loathed most about this new Stalinist Russia: the dreariness of it. All the towns the same. Depressing grey concrete, grey garb and grey faces, dull eyes that slid away from you to the grey shadows and mouths that stayed firmly shut. He missed the exuberant colours of China, the same way he missed its swooping roof lines and vibrant songbirds.

Lydia was proving harder to deal with than he’d expected. When he sat her down and explained the dangers here, she just laughed that effortless laugh of hers, tossed her flaming hair at him and assured him with eyes wide that she might be only seventeen but she’d lived with danger before and knew how to handle it.

‘But this danger is different,’ he’d explained patiently. ‘It’s everywhere. In the air you breathe, in the khleb you eat and in the pillow that lies under your head at night. This is Josef Stalin’s Russia. It’s 1930. No one is safe.’

‘ Davai, davai, davai! Come on, come on, come on!’

The gamblers in the bar were chanting the words, and to Alexei it sounded dismally like the bleating of sheep. The locals had bet their petty kopecks on their own man and now crowded round the pair, who were locked together as intimately as a couple in the throes of sexual frenzy, mouths open and spittle in silver threads between their lips. There was nothing more than a shiver between Popkov’s arm and the table. You couldn’t slide a goddamn knife between them. Alexei felt his heart kick up a pace and that was when Lydia leaned down to the Cossack and whispered something in his ear. She was a small slender figure among the bulk of broad swarthy faces and thick padded waists, but her hair stood out like a fire down there in the dim light as it drew close to the greasy black curls and stayed there.

It took a moment. No more. Then slowly the massive arm began to rise, to force the other arm back, a whisper at a time, until the crowd began to howl its anguish. The local man flared his broad flat nostrils and roared a battle cry, but it did him no good. Popkov’s arm was unstoppable.

What the hell was she saying to him?

A final roar from Popkov and the battle was over, as he drove his opponent’s meaty fist flat on to the surface. The force of the impact made the table screech as if in pain. Alexei pushed himself back from the banister, turned on his heel and set off for his room, but not before he’d seen Lydia dart a glance in his direction. Her wide tawny eyes were ablaze with the light of victory.

Alexei leaned his back casually against the closed door of Lydia’s room and looked around the tiny space. It was no better than a cell. A narrow bed, a wooden chair and a metal hook on the back of the door. That was it. He’d say this for her, she never moaned about the conditions however bad they were.

It was dark outside, a wind rattling a bunch of loose shingles on the roof, and the naked overhead lightbulb flickered every now and again. In Russia, Alexei had learned, you never take anything for granted. You appreciate everything . Because you never know when it will disappear. You may have electricity today, but it could vanish tomorrow. Heating pipes shook and shuddered like trams on Nevsky, one day dispensing a warm fug of heat but lying silent and cold the next. The same with trains. When would the next one arrive? Tomorrow? Next week? Even next month? To travel any distance across this vast and relentless country you had to have the patience of Lenin in his damn mausoleum.

‘Don’t grumble.’

Alexei’s gaze flicked to Lydia. ‘I’m not grumbling. I’m not even speaking.’

‘But I can hear you. Inside your head. Grumbling.’

‘Why would I be grumbling, Lydia? Tell me why.’

She pushed back her hair, lifted her head and gave him a sharp glance. She had a way of doing that which was always catching him off guard, making him feel she could see inside his head. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, the thin quilt pulled round her shoulders and a square of green material between her knees. Her busy fingers were counting out her winnings into small piles.

‘Because you’re angry with me about the arm wrestling for some reason.’ Lydia studied the money thoughtfully. ‘It does no harm, Alexei. It’s not as if I’m stealing.’

He refused to accept the bait. Her thieving activities of the past, snatching wallets and watches the way a fox snatches chickens, were not something he cared to discuss right now.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but you took something from them downstairs and they won’t thank you for it.’

Lydia shrugged her thin shoulders and returned to her miniature coin towers. ‘I took their money because they lost.’

‘Not the money.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Their pride. You took away their pride, then you rubbed their noses in it by emptying their pockets.’

Her eyes remained firmly on the money. ‘It was fairly won.’

‘Fairly won,’ he echoed. ‘Fairly won.’ He shook his head angrily but kept his voice low, his words deliberately measured. ‘That is not the point, Lydia.’