Kate Furnivall: The Concubine's Secret

‘So what else did you learn about this woman?’

Lydia let her gaze be drawn back to the ripple of dark hair and the arrogant lift of the chin.

‘She’s the Commandant’s wife.’

Alexei studied the woman. The camp Commandant’s wife. Now that was interesting. No wonder the uniforms hovered so close.

He experienced a sudden unreasonable rush of hope. He knew it was totally unwarranted, ridiculous even, but he was powerless to crush it. Last summer in China he’d jumped on a train with Lydia without a backward glance, and together they’d headed hundreds of bone-shaking miles north across the border to Vladivostok to find a father neither of them had seen or heard of for over twelve years. Alexei had done it for a whole handful of different reasons but expectation of success was certainly not one of them.

In his heart he was certain their search for Jens Friis was doomed to failure, but he never uttered a word of this to Lydia. The Soviet State was too massive and too resolute a fist to prise open and anyway their father was surely dead by now. Few could survive in those terrible camps where conditions were so harsh. The slave work in mines or on railways or canals or roads in freezing Siberian temperatures was brutal. Worse than brutal. Life out there was too thin, a brittle thread too easily snapped. The death rate was unimaginable.

Nevertheless, Alexei had come. Why?

Night after night on their long journey into Russia, he’d lain awake in bed in the early hours of the morning in some flea-bitten hostel or other, smoking cigarette after cigarette. He’d been forced to listen to the snores and loose farts of the other men in the Soviet communal dormitories while he considered and discarded one plan after another. In reality he knew planning was pointless. They had no way of knowing what lay ahead, so what purpose did it serve?

None. Absolutely none. But he was military trained and could no more stop his thoughts making precise preparations than he could prevent this sudden burst of hope at the sight of the Commandant’s wife. He looked across at his sister on the station platform. She was totally unaware of how she drew eyes to herself, envious eyes. Not for her drab brown coat or her straight young back. Not even for her flame-coloured hair which she’d tucked under her woollen hat as he’d instructed, but which crawled back out in rebellious tendrils as soon as she wasn’t paying attention.

No. Not for any of those did the eyes follow her. It was because there was an irrepressible air about her, an energy that they all envied, all craved. There was something unbroken, untamed in the way she swung her head or darted her eyes. They envied her that. However much he clothed her in drooping coats and stuck ugly hats on her head, he couldn’t hide it. He lit himself another cheroot and saw Lydia turn her head, give him a soft, almost shy smile.

He knew why he’d come. He’d come for her.

‘We’re close now.’

Alexei’s words caught Lydia by surprise. They were about to climb on to the train. Just when it seemed they’d be stranded for yet another interminable day, the train had announced itself with a belch of smoke. The crush of passengers surged around them on the platform but the big Cossack grinned, holding them back from the steps to make space for Lydia. Alexei offered a hand to help her up the steps, and that was when he said, ‘We’re close now.’

‘It’s taken us long enough.’ She felt a rush of affection as she gripped his hand.

‘It’s just a matter of narrowing the distance, day by day.’

‘I know, and we’re getting better at it, Alexei. We’re close now and we’ll stay that way.’

He hesitated, but he returned the pressure of her fingers. Only then did it occur to Lydia that she might have misunderstood. Alexei might not have been talking about them – about her and himself. He could have been referring to the fact that they were getting closer to the camp. Suddenly she felt mortified at her blunder.

‘Lydia.’ Alexei leapt up on the step behind her and touched her shoulder. ‘I’m glad I came.’

She turned and looked at him. ‘I’m glad you did, too,’ she said.

Lydia tucked the rug tightly around her knees and sank deeper into her seat between Alexei and Popkov. The train compartment was full but most of her fellow travellers were dozing. One old man over by the door was snuffling into his moustache.

‘What part of Russia do you hail from, girl?’

It was the passenger in the seat opposite who had spoken, the woman who had been snoring in the next room at the hotel. She was plump and middle-aged, with a flowered scarf around her head, making her cheeks puff out like a hamster’s.

Lydia felt pleased by the question. It made all the aching hours of hard work worth the effort. For months now she’d spoken nothing but Russian and was even finding herself thinking in Russian now. The words seemed to fit inside her mouth as if finally they belonged there. From the moment they left China, Alexei and Popkov adamantly refused to speak anything but Russian to her.

She’d groaned and moaned and whined, but Alexei wouldn’t budge. It was fine for him. He’d lived in St Petersburg until he was twelve years old and had the advantage that, even in China after the Bolshevik Revolution, his mother, Countess Serova, had insisted on speaking her native tongue within the home. So no problems for him. The words flowed from him like black Russian oil, and even though he spoke English as elegantly as any English county squire, he refused to let even one word of it pass his lips.

Lydia had cursed him. In English. In Russian. Even in Chinese.

‘You bastard, Alexei, you’re enjoying this. Help me out here.’

‘ Nyet.’

‘Damn you.’

He’d smiled that infuriating smile of his and watched her make a mess of it again and again. It had been a lonely start for her, isolated by her lack of words, but now, though she hated to admit it, she realised he’d been right. She’d learned fast and now she enjoyed using the language her Russian mother had refused to teach her.

‘Russian?’ Valentina would say in their Chinese attic with a scowl on her beautiful fine-boned face, her dark eyes flashing with contempt. ‘What good is Russian now? Russia is finished. Look how those murdering Bolsheviks destroy my poor country and strip her naked. I tell you, malishka, forget Russia. English is the language of the future.’

Then she’d toss her long silky hair as if tossing all Russian words out of her head.

But now in a cold and smelly train rattling its way across the great flat plain of northern Russia towards Felanka, Lydia was cramming those words into her own head and listening to the woman opposite her asking, ‘What part of Russia do you hail from?’

‘I come from Smolensk,’ she lied and saw the woman nod, satisfied.

‘From Smolensk,’ she said again, and liked the sound of it.

China, 1930

The cave was cold. Cold enough to freeze the breath of the gods, yet too shallow to risk a fire. Chang An Lo had hunkered down in the entrance, still as one of the brittle grey rocks that littered the naked mountainside all around him. No movement. Nothing. Grey against the unrelenting grey of the winter sky. But outside the cave a thin dusty crust of snow swirled off the frozen scree and formed stinging tumbles of ice in the air that clung to his eyelashes, and nicked the skin of his lips till they bled. He didn’t notice. Behind him water trickled down the lichen-draped walls, a whispery treacherous sound that seeped into his mind sharper than the cold.

Hold the mind firm.

Mao Tse Tung’s words. The powerful new leader who had wrenched control of the Chinese Communist Party for himself.