Kate Furnivall - The Concubine's Secret

The body was heavy. It lay across his shoulder still shrouded in the rug, weighing down his step and causing him to stumble over unseen branches. The woman tried to help, seizing his arm or holding on to a piece of fabric but all she did was drag at him and twist him further off balance. Lydia did not touch the bulk of Wolf Eyes and even in the darkness he could sense her distaste. That satisfied him. That she didn’t wish to touch this man.

‘Here will do.’ Lydia said it quickly, eager to rid Chang of the burden.

But the wife spoke up, her voice brittle in the icy silence of the forest. ‘Not here, not yet, it’s not deep enough in.’

‘Antonina,’ Lydia said so softly the wind almost stole her words, ‘we are far from the road. No one will come here.’

With the wife’s help Chang laid the body on the ground and she immediately crouched down beside it, her hand resting on the rug as if reluctant to release ownership of its contents. No one spoke. Chang flexed his shoulders to ease the muscles of his back and looked around. This was as good a place as any. The moon’s pale light barely filtered through the spread of branches, but where it did it transformed the snow-packed ground into a harsh blue sea and the trees into silver sentinels. He took the shovel Lydia had carried and started to dig.

He worked to a steady rhythm but once through the snow it was like trying to dig into rock: the earth was frozen solid. He could feel his tendons tearing but didn’t stop. This was not the first time he had buried a body in a forest or carried a fallen comrade from a battlefield; wherever he turned, in whatever country, death seemed to stalk him. And sadness seemed to rise out of the earth as he dug, with the stink of death on every shovel of soil. It crouched there and he breathed it in till his lungs ached.

‘Enough,’ Lydia murmured.

He looked up, surprised. He had almost forgotten that he was not alone. She was standing off to one side among the trees, watching his movements, her face in shadow, hidden from him.

‘Enough,’ she said again. ‘No more.’

Was it the grave she meant? Or was it death itself she was speaking of?

The wife was still crouched on her knees by the rug, her head bowed, her hair a curtain across her face. In the darkness she looked as though she had settled for ever on the forest floor and he wondered if she felt she was the one who should be lying in the rug, the one who should remain alone in the cold earth. He threw down the shovel and reached for the rug, but at that moment a sudden blundering noise in the forest startled the woman and she leapt to her feet, eyes wide and drained of colour by the moonlight.

‘A moose,’ he said and heard her gasp of relief.

With respect for the dead, even if it was Wolf Eyes, he rolled the rug carefully to the edge of the grave, but when he started to remove the body from its folds, the wife stepped forward.

‘Let me,’ she said.

He moved back while she unwrapped her husband’s corpse with slow, hesitant movements and slid it into the shallow grave as gently as if it were a sleeping child.

‘Goodnight, Dmitri,’ she whispered softly. ‘May God bring peace to your soul.’ Silver tears were flowing down her cheeks.

Chang bowed his head and commended the Russian’s spirit to his ancestors, but when he looked round for Lydia she was standing stiffly beside a tree, arms folded tightly across her chest. She didn’t move, just stared at the black trench he’d dug. What was she seeing? The terrible waste of death? Or the similar hole that had swallowed her mother only months earlier? He breathed slowly, calming the race of his blood as it burned through his veins. Or did she foresee her father’s end, as her fears stared straight into the eyes of death? Out here in the forest, life was fragile. Its thread a fine silver filament in the moonlight.

He picked up the shovel and started to cover the body of Dmitri Malofeyev with black Russian soil. He did not mention that wolves would claw open the grave before dawn marked it with the light of day.

They washed each other. Chang loved the touch of her hands on his skin and the sight of her flaming mane spilling over her naked shoulder blades. Together they soaped away the dregs of the day’s dirt, from their minds and from their bodies, and afterwards they made love. They didn’t hurry, exploring and caressing each other, teasing tender places and tasting the curve of a neck, the hollow at the top of a thigh, the arch of a foot, the hardness of a nipple.

It was as though they were discovering each other all over again, at the end of a day that had changed something between them. He relearnt the exact sound of her moan when he was inside her and the way she whimpered when he slowed to long, rhythmic strokes, her fingers digging at his back as if they would scoop out his heart. When finally he lay with his cheek flat on her stomach, sweat salty on his tongue, he must have fallen asleep because he woke suddenly and sensed that Lydia had moved. She was kneeling beside him on the bed, moonlight painting her hair silver. Lying across her palms was his knife. She had removed it from his boot.

‘It was you, wasn’t it, Chang An Lo?’

He felt a rush of blood through his veins, but he lay totally still.

‘What was me?’

‘In the forest.’

‘Of course it was. We were there together. I helped you bury your-’

‘No.’ She turned the blade over and over in her hand, the way she was turning over her thoughts, touching a finger to the unicorn carved into the ivory handle. ‘You know what I mean.’

Her hair hung round her face, shrouding it in secretive shadows.

‘Yes, Lydia, I know what you mean.’

‘In the forest with the soldiers. Four of them dead.’

He listened to her breathing. It was fast and shallow.

‘I could not bear to let you die,’ he answered.

‘So it wasn’t Maksim Voshchinsky watching our backs?’

‘No.’

‘How did you know where I was?’

‘It wasn’t hard, you are part of my heart. How could I not know where it was beating?’

But she would not be put off. ‘Tell me how.’

‘You mentioned to me that you were going out in Voshchinsky’s car. It was not hard to guess where you would be heading.’

‘So you knew? Already knew where the complex was that my father works in?’

‘I have a companion who is as capable of tracking trucks as any Muscovite vor.’

‘Kuan?’

‘No. A good friend of my heart named Biao.’ He removed the knife from her grasp and placed it to one side. ‘You must take care, my love. Beware of betrayal. Too many people know what you are doing.’

‘Except my father.’ He heard her pause and release a long, low sigh. ‘Jens Friis doesn’t know.’

With an abrupt movement Chang sat up and brushed Lydia ’s hair from her face. Her pupils were huge as she looked at him, her mouth alive. Firmly she pressed him back on the bed and moved on top of his body, her hands flat on his chest.

‘My love,’ she murmured, ‘how do I thank you for my life?’

‘By keeping it safe.’

As her hips started to move, he yearned to take her away from Moscow. From her father, from her brother, from the woman with the dead husband. From herself.

Snow had fallen overnight and transformed the prison into a creature of beauty. Its roofs and windowsills, its courtyard and even its stone seat, all glittered under the early morning floodlights like pearls on a wedding dress. Jens hated it. Such hypocrisy. How could something so ugly inside look so exquisite? He trudged the circle, single file, head down, no talking. Snowflakes settled on his eyelashes and melted down his cheeks like tears. In front of him Olga’s small figure stumbled and for half a second he held her elbow to support her. It felt as fragile as a sparrow’s wing.