Kate Furnivall - The Concubine's Secret

‘He’s well, apparently.’

Not injured. Not sick.

Lydia walked faster. As if she could reach him if she moved quickly enough. But Antonina slowed and she was forced to turn and wait for the pale grey boots to catch up.

‘Don’t rush off,’ Antonina complained. ‘I haven’t finished.’

Lydia stood still on the pavement and faced her. Her cheeks felt stiff. ‘Where is the prison and why are you telling me this?’

Antonina’s carefully guarded face softened as she tilted her head apologetically and gripped her gloved hands together. ‘I’m sorry, Lydia, I don’t know where it is. Dmitri didn’t say.’

‘Did you ask?’

‘No.’

‘Will you ask him?’

‘If you want.’

‘Of course I want.’

‘He’s being very attentive at the moment, so maybe I can try. Look what he gave me.’ She slipped back the wide cuff of the silver-fox coat and revealed a slender wrist encased in a grey leather glove, so pale it was almost white. Around it was clasped a wide gold bracelet inlaid with amethysts and ivory.

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s obviously very old and very lovely.’

Antonina inspected it quizzically for a second and then slid it off her wrist, pushing it deep into her coat pocket.

‘I hate it,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘I fear it might be a blood gift. That it might have been given to Dmitri by some old tsarist countess as a bribe. To let her husband live. In the camp, I mean. Some old White Russian general with a big moustache and proud eyes, but too weak to work in the mines or forests any more.’ She turned her head and spat in the gutter. ‘That’s what I fear.’

‘Antonina, why are you telling me all this?’

‘Because I want you to trust me.’

‘Why on earth would you care whether or not I trust you?’

The woman’s gloves started to fret against each other, making a soft fluttering sound like birds’ wings. ‘If I tell you that your father leaves the guarded prison every few days and travels through the streets of Moscow in the back of a truck, taken to work in a less well-guarded place… will you trust me then?’

Lydia put out a hand and gently held the nervous gloves, preventing their movement. ‘What is it you want, Antonina? Tell me.’

‘I want to know where your brother Alexei is.’

‘He’s gone missing again.’

‘What?’

‘We don’t know where he is.’

‘ Chyort! ’ Antonina’s face was stricken with dismay. ‘ Lydia, you lost him once already. What’s the matter with you? Can’t you keep anyone safe? You seem to lose everyone, even your own father. For heaven’s sake, I-’ She shook her dark hair so that it swung around her like a cloud of unhappiness, and strode on along the pavement.

Lydia wasn’t certain what made her do what she did next. Was it anger? Despair? Guilt? She wasn’t sure. All three churned inside her. Or just that she was stung by Antonina’s rebuke and needed to strike back? Whichever it was, she didn’t care. But when she hurried to catch up with her companion, brushing her arm to turn her round, it took less than a second to slide the bracelet from the fur pocket into her own.

‘I’ll find him,’ Lydia told her. The conviction in it sounded genuine even to her own ears.

A car drove past, wheels hissing, and sprayed them with oily chips of ice, but neither noticed. Lydia ’s attention fixed on Antonina, on the dark deep-set eyes with the long lashes and the look of secret despair. In that second Lydia saw an outsider like herself, a woman struggling to find where she was going.

‘I’ll help you,’ Lydia said urgently, ‘and you help me. Find out from Dmitri where the prison is.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Do more than try.’

‘I think he might prefer to tell you himself.’

‘I’ve already asked. He said no.’

‘And what will you do for me in return?’ Antonina asked it faintly, as if she didn’t expect kindness for its own sake.

‘I’ll find Alexei. I promise. And I’ll tell you where he is as soon as I know.’

They smiled at each other, a little ripple of relief. Neither knew quite why, but they were both aware of an odd connection of sorts. Lydia could feel the bracelet breathing hot against her hip. Yet when Antonina opened her pale leather purse, pulled out a bunch of rouble coins and notes and thrust it into Lydia ’s hand, she took it without hesitation.

After that, she ran. To make up the lost time and to keep ahead of the thoughts that pursued her like a swarm of mosquitoes. She scoured the streets, searched doorways, walked the glossy district of the Arbat and dredged the scruffy areas where drunks were already sprawled in the gutters, wrapped in newspapers and death’s icy shadow.

‘Do you know a boy called Edik?’

She asked every street urchin she found. The dirty ones selling single cigarettes on street corners or bottles of watered-down vodka outside the bars. The cleaner delivery lads running errands for shopkeepers. Even the pretty ones who wore lipstick and paraded their tiny hips behind the Bolshoi. A thousand times: ‘Do you know a boy called Edik?’

It started to snow. The streets grew darker as the shops closed their doors and rattled their shutters. She no longer knew where she was, her feet hurt and she didn’t know if it was the cold or the holes in her valenki. She should go home. Perhaps Alexei had already returned. Liev would be growling and pacing their poky little room. Probably Elena was scolding him, telling him Lydia was quite capable of looking after herself. Yet instead her feet kept walking and, as the night and the snow descended, she had a sense that Moscow was swallowing her. She spotted another boy across the street pulling something bulky behind him on a length of string. Pale hair and a long dark coat, shoulders iced with snowflakes.

‘Edik!’ she shouted.

The boy turned his head nervously. In the spill of yellow light from a gas streetlamp she realised her mistake. It wasn’t him. He started to run.

‘Wait!’

She raced across the empty street. He would have been too fast for her but whatever he was dragging along slowed him down and she caught him with ease. The something on a string, she discovered, was a plump piglet. It was trussed, front and back legs, its snout tied shut with a filthy rag, and lying on its side on a small ramshackle sledge that was steadily disappearing under a blanket of snow. The animal looked paralysed with fear, its pink eye rolling wildly in its socket. The boy was no more than eight or nine years old and squinted at her with the eyes of a feral creature.

‘Where on earth did you get this from?’

‘It’s my grandfather’s,’ the boy lied and trotted off again, dragging the sledge over the ruts in the ice, jerking it in fits and starts.

‘Wait!’

Lydia pulled out one of Antonina’s roubles. Instantly the boy became more alert. Even though he had his back to her, he could smell the money.

‘I’m searching for-’

‘I know. A boy called Edik.’

‘How do you know that?’

He gazed at her as if she were stupid. ‘Because you’ve been going round all evening asking for him.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Everybody.’ But the answer didn’t come from the boy; it came from behind her.

She swung round. A man was standing right at her shoulder, a large looming shadow. How he’d come so close without making a sound, even over the ice, she couldn’t imagine. He must possess the feet of a cat. Though he had heavy burly shoulders, his hair was brown and curly and gave the impression of boyish friendliness. In the dark she couldn’t make out his expression properly but she had the distinct feeling that, unlike his curls, it wasn’t friendly. She backed off a step.