Kate Furnivall: The Concubine's Secret

‘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.

A sudden ache in her throat caught her unawares at the thought of her father locked in one of Stalin’s brutal prison camps. She rested her forehead against the icy pane and the shock of the cold glass jerked her mind away from places it didn’t want to go. She focused on tomorrow. The station. Another long day for her between Alexei and Popkov. It was wrong what she’d done in the bar, using whispers about Alexei to bait the Cossack.

‘See him up there, Popkov? Watching you.’

Her words blew hot on the black hairs in his ears.

‘He wants you to lose. He’s laughing, Popkov, sneering… Da , you’re winning now… He’s gone. Couldn’t bear to watch you win.’