Kate Furnivall - The Concubine's Secret

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.’

The silence. The stillness. The sameness. They rob you. Steal your sense of self.

In a set of bright basement rooms deep under the streets of Moscow, a tall man leaned over a clutch of technical drawings spread out over the surface of his desk and for a moment wondered whether he was dead or alive. Sometimes he couldn’t tell.

Week by week, the days scarcely varied. The electric light was never switched off and the concept of darkness became a luxury he craved. He worked whenever he chose, whenever he could concentrate his mind, unaware of time or routine. Right now, was it day or night? He had no idea. He released the pair of callipers from his hand and let them clatter on to the wooden surface of the desk, just to hear a noise of some kind other than the hum of the hot water pipes that trailed along the walls.

He rested his chin on his hand. What were other people doing? Eating? Singing? Best of all, talking? He allowed his mind to create a world up there above his head, a city where snow fell on to golden church domes in a thick lacy curtain. Where sounds were muffled and there was the swish of greased runners, and hopeful young street urchins touted firewood for sale, hauling it along the gutters on sledges.

Moscow was alive above him. Living and laughing. He could smell the dough in the ovens and taste the sour cream on his tongue… but only in his dreams. In his waking hours there was nothing but silence, stillness and sameness.

‘So you have a daughter.’

Jens Friis made no response. He was sharpening a pencil when the guard rattled his keys, unlocked the heavy metal door and entered the workroom with a grimace on his face. It was the fat one, Poliakov. He wasn’t so bad. Better than some of the other bastards. And this one liked to talk, even if it was just to poke and prod the prisoners out of their carefully constructed shells. Jens didn’t mind that. He’d developed a knack of letting the taunts slide past, and responding with comments that sometimes succeeded in enticing the warder into conversation.