The Russian Concubine

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘Love,’ she said. ‘And loyalty. They’re my reasons. Worth surviving for. He’s my father, Chang An Lo. I want to know what reason has kept him alive for ten long years in a wretched Russian prison camp.’

  ‘The iron in a man’s heart comes from his mind.’

  ‘In a woman’s too.’

  Chang smiled, but not lightly. He reached to where his discarded clothes lay in a bundle on the floor. ‘I have something for you.’

  He pulled out a leather pouch and from it he drew a small pink pendant, which he placed in the palm of her hand.

  ‘This is a powerful Chinese symbol. Of love.’

  She studied it carefully. ‘A dragon.’ It was exquisitely shaped, curled up like a kitten.

  ‘Yes. Carved of rose quartz. Wear it always. It will protect you and ward off evil spirits until I return.’

  ‘It’s beautiful, thank you.’

  She kissed him and they made love again, slow and lingering, savouring every touch and every taste, and then fierce in those final moments when they became a part of each other. It was at the point of her final shuddering release that something changed in him, she felt it, some instinct made him clamp a hand over her mouth and whisper close in her ear.

  ‘Listen.’

  She listened. Heard nothing. Except the wind tearing at the trees. But her heart and stomach seemed to collide. ‘You’ll need that knife.’

  The door was kicked open. It shrieked on its hinges and rebounded against the wall with a slam as a British army officer strode into the musty shed, his eyes quick and sharp. Behind him the grey uniforms of the Kuomintang hovered like leashed hounds on the trail.

  Lydia leaped to her feet, wrapped in a blanket. ‘Get out! How dare you burst in here? This is private property.’

  ‘A warrant.’ The officer waved a piece of paper rudely in her face. ‘Don’t play innocent, miss. Where is he?’

  Already hands were rummaging through the blankets, among the boxes and cobwebs and old cans as if their prey might be hiding in one. It was when they yanked the sacks away from the back wall that the Chinese captain with the stone-hard face swore and yelled at his men to search outside. Where the sacks had stood was a gaping hole. The bottom of two planks had been carefully sawn through and removed. Lydia’s afternoon of waiting had not been completely without purpose.

  ‘Where is he, miss?’ the English officer snapped.

  ‘Gone,’ she said. And again softly to herself. ‘Gone.’

  65

  The time following that night was fractured time for Lydia. The days passed but didn’t exist. Images flashing by, blurred and meaningless. Only the meeting with Polly stood out and held her attention.

  ‘Lydia, I’m sorry.’ Polly had turned up on the doorstep, bearing a gift of macaroons tied up in silk with a lavender ribbon. ‘Forgive me, Lyd. I only meant to do what seemed best for you.’

  It was hard. To let go of the anger. But Lydia told herself that if Polly’s words had not drawn Po Chu’s men to her in the shed that day, they’d only have found her some other day. Some other place. It would have turned out the same in the end. The Box. The water jammed in her throat. The iron-toothed tweezers on her breast. Nothing would have changed all that.

  So she smiled into Polly’s worried blue eyes and hugged her close. ‘It’s okay, I understand. Really I do. You thought you were looking after me but it didn’t go quite right.’

  ‘You see, my father . . .’

  ‘Hush, Polly, hush. Forget it. It wasn’t your fault. Your father does things sometimes that aren’t always right.’

  But not anymore. Christopher Mason would not be doing things that weren’t right with his daughter anymore. So Lydia kissed her friend’s pale cheek and told her she would be leaving Junchow. Polly had cried, and they had clung to each other and promised to meet up again one day in London, in Trafalgar Square with the pigeons. Nothing else during those days was clear in Lydia’s mind. Until the morning that she was standing on the railway platform with Alfred, clutching a net of oranges under her arm and a ticket to Vladivostok in her hand. Then everything came into focus. Pin-sharp. So bright it hurt her mind.

  The oily belch of the steam engine excited her. All around them crowds jostled, travellers shouted to each other, carriage doors banged. A porter heaved bags. Vendors pushed trays of baos and hot roasted peanuts in her face, rang their bells, and yelled their wares. Interweaving through it all like a yellow river drifted five Buddhist monks in saffron robes, murmuring prayers and scattering incense. Lydia put a coin in their begging bowls. To please Chang An Lo’s gods.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said to Alfred.

  ‘My dear girl, can I not persuade you? Even now?’

  ‘No, Alfred. But I am grateful, really I am.’

  She meant it. He had been astonishing. When he realised he couldn’t shift her from her decision, he pulled every string he could get his hands on and had turned Sir Edward Carlisle’s neat bureaucracy inside out to acquire a visa and passport for her so fast. Both were in a name that still sat strangely on her tongue. Lydia Parker.

  ‘A good British passport,’ Alfred had insisted. ‘That’s what gets you places in this world. It will protect you. The might of the British Empire, you know, right there behind you.’

  He had a point. No doubting that. But she had more faith in herself than in his empire, so, unknown to her stepfather, another passport was hitched inside her waistband. A Russian one. Forged, of course. Name of Lydia Ivanova. Just in case. Part of the survival kit.

  ‘I’ll send you a wire, Alfred, I promise. As soon as I can.’

  ‘Do that, my girl. You know I’ll worry.’

  She looked at his face and couldn’t understand how it had grown so dear to her. He had lost a few pounds and his brown eyes seemed to have sunk deeper into his head than . . . before. How had she once thought them pompous? She leaned forward and hugged him.

  ‘Sure you have enough money?’ he asked.

  ‘If I had any more golden guineas sewn into my clothes and glued inside the soles of my shoes, the train would need an extra engine to cart me over the mountains.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, you’ve got my solicitor’s address in London, so you can always reach me and I can wire you money for a steamer ticket to England. I won’t stay much longer. Not now. Not here in China.’

  She held on to his hand for a moment, trying to find the right words and failing. In the end she said with a smile, ‘Be happy in England. She’d want you to be.’

  ‘I know.’ His lips tightened. He nodded. Patted her arm. ‘Keep yourself safe, my dear girl. God be with you.’

  ‘I have my bear with me.’

  She glanced into the carriage. Liev Popkov was seated there. His great fist was stroking his beard and somehow managed to make even that simple gesture threatening rather than thoughtful. Her own small leather suitcase rested beside him on the bench seat, safe as the Bank of England. Probably safer. Even Alfred laughed when he saw two men back quickly out of the compartment when they encountered Liev’s single black eye and outstretched legs, as if a buffalo had snorted in their faces.

  The train guard started slamming doors. The smell of hot metal stung Lydia’s nostrils as another belch of steam sent black smut swirling up the platform. The engine heaved itself into life. Whistles shrieked. This was it. Her heart was hammering in her chest, but at the same time something was tearing apart in there and she couldn’t quite hold it together. She jumped up on the carriage step, and it was then that she saw the tall figure with the silk scarf, short brown hair, and lazy stride ambling along the platform, as if he had all the time in the world. He strolled up to her carriage and doffed his smart new fur cap to her.

  ‘Alexei.’ She grinned at him. ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’

  ‘Changed my mind. Not keen on this place anymore, a bit too chilly for me.’ He glanced over his shoulder toward the station entrance and though he kept it casual, she could spot the unease in his green eyes.r />
  ‘Too hot, I think you mean. Come on, Papa will be glad to see you,’ she said and stepped to one side.

  Alexei gave her a look that she couldn’t read, but it didn’t matter. Her brother was here. He shook hands with Alfred, who muttered, ‘Good man, look after her,’ and then Alexei leaped easily into the carriage beside her.

  ‘We have company, I see,’ he drawled and stared suspiciously at the big greasy Russian.

  Lydia laughed. This could get interesting. It was going to be a long journey.

  The clouds overhead were moody and silver-edged as she took her seat. She leaned her head against the juddering window, drew in a deep breath, and released it slowly as Chang An Lo had taught her, watching the pane of glass mist up and obscure what was out there. What lay ahead terrified her. And thrilled her. She knew she could survive it. She’d said so many times. That was the one thing she was good at. Surviving. Hadn’t she proved it? Well, now she was going to help her father survive.

  She wiped a hand over the window. Cleared a swathe of glass.

  Because now she knew that you didn’t survive on your own. Everyone who touched your life sent a ripple effect through you, and all the ripples interconnected. She could sense them inside her, surging and flowing, doubling back and overlapping, all the way back to the beginning. And at the centre of them all was Chang An Lo. She wrapped her hand tight around the quartz dragon pendant. He and she would survive this and would be together again when all the turmoil was over, of that she was sure. She stared intently up at the low ridge of hills ahead where rumour had it that the Communists camped out, as if she could keep him safe by sheer force of will alone. She sent out a ripple of her own.

  The train growled to a start.

  Read on for an extract from Kate Furnivall’s

  breathtaking novel, Under a Blood Red Sky,

  published by Sphere in November 2008.

  For more information on Kate Furnivall visit her website at www.katefurnivall.com

  1

  Davinsky Labour Camp, Siberia

  February 1933

  The Zone. That’s what the compound was called.

  A double barrier of dense barbed wire encircled it, backed by a high fence and watchtowers that never slept. In Sofia Morozova’s mind it merged with all the other hated lice-ridden camps she’d been in. Transit camps were the worst. They ate up your soul, then spat you out into cattle trucks to move you on to the next one. Etap, it was called, this shifting of prisoners from one camp to another until no friends, no possessions and no self remained. You became nothing. That’s what they wanted.

  Work is an Act of Honour, Courage and Heroism. Those words were emblazoned in iron letters a metre high over the gates of Davinsky prison labour camp. Every time Sofia was marched in and out to work in the depths of the taiga forest she read Stalin’s words above her head. Twice a day for the ten years that were her sentence. That would add up to over seven thousand times - that is, if she lived that long, which was unlikely. Would she come to believe that hard labour was an ‘Act of Heroism’ after reading those words seven thousand times? Would she care any more whether she believed it or not?

  As she trudged out into the snow in the five o’clock darkness of an Arctic morning with six hundred other prisoners, two abreast in a long silent shuffling crocodile, she spat as she passed under Stalin’s words. The spittle froze before it hit the ground.

  ‘There’s going to be a white-out,’ Sofia said.

  She had an uncanny knack for smelling out the weather half a day before it arrived. It wasn’t something she’d been aware of in the days when she lived near Petrograd, but there the skies were nowhere near as high, nor so alarmingly empty. Out here, where the forests swallowed you whole, it came easily to her. She turned to the young woman sitting at her side.

  ‘Go on, Anna, you’d better go over and tell the guards to get the ropes out.’

  ‘A good excuse for me to warm my hands on their fire, anyway.’ Anna smiled. She was a fragile figure, always quick to find a smile, but the shadows under her blue eyes had grown so dark they looked bruised, as though she’d been in a fight.

  Sofia was more worried about her friend than she was willing to admit, even to herself. Just watching Anna stamping her feet to keep the blood flowing made her anxious.

  ‘Make sure the brainless bastards take note of it,’ grimaced Nina, a wide-hipped Ukrainian who knew how to swing a sledgehammer better than any of them. ‘I don’t want our brigade to lose any of you in the white-out. We need every single pair of hands if we’re ever going to get this blasted road built.’

  When visibility dropped to absolute zero in blizzard conditions, the prisoners were roped together on the long trek back to camp. Not to stop them escaping, but to prevent them blundering out of line and freezing to death in the snow.

  ‘Fuck the ropes,’ snorted Tasha, the woman on the other side of Sofia. Tasha tucked her greasy dark hair back under her headscarf. She had small narrow features and a prim mouth that was surprisingly adept at swearing. ‘If they’ve got any bloody sense, we’ll finish early today and get back to the stinking huts ahead of it.’

  ‘That would be better for you, Anna,’ Sofia nodded. ‘A shorter day. You could rest.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘But I do worry.’

  ‘No, I’m doing well today. I’ll soon be catching up with your work rate, Nina. You’d better watch out.’

  Anna gave a mischievous smile to the three other women and they laughed outright, but Sofia noticed that her friend didn’t miss the quick glance that passed between them. Anna struggled against another spasm of coughing and sipped her midday chai to soothe her raw throat. Not that the drink deserved to be called tea. It was a bitter brew made from pine needles and moss that was said to fight scurvy. Whether that was true or just a rumour spread around to make them drink the brown muck was uncertain, but it fooled the stomach into thinking it was being fed and that was all they cared about.

  The four women were seated on a felled pine tree, huddled together for warmth, kicking bald patches in the snow with their lapti, boots shaped from soft birch bark. They were making the most of their half-hour midday break from perpetual labour. Sofia tipped her head back to ease the ache in her shoulders and stared up at the blank white sky - today lying like a lid over them, shutting them in, pressing them down, stealing their freedom away. She felt a familiar ball of anger burn in her chest. This was no life. Not even fit for an animal. But anger was not the answer, because all it did was drain the few pathetic scraps of energy she possessed from her veins. She knew that. She’d struggled to rid herself of it but it wouldn’t go away. It trailed in her footsteps like a sick dog.

  All around, as far as the eye could see and the mind could imagine, stretched dense forests of pine trees, great seas of them that swept in endless waves across the whole of northern Russia, packed tight under snow - and through it all they were attempting to carve a road. It was like trying to dig a coal mine with a teaspoon. Dear God, but road-building was wretched. Brutal at the best of times, but with inadequate tools and temperatures of twenty or even thirty degrees below freezing it became a living nightmare. Your shovels cracked, your hands turned black, your breath froze in your lungs.

  ‘Davay! Hurry! Back to work!’

  The guards crowded round the brazier and shouted orders, but they didn’t leave their circle of precious warmth. Along the length of the arrow-straight scar that sliced through the trees to make space for the new road, hunched bodies pulled their padded coats and ragged gloves over any patch of exposed skin. A collective sigh of resignation rose like smoke in the air as the brigades of women took up their hammers and spades once more.

  Anna was the first on her feet, eager to prove she could meet the required norm, the work quota for each day. ‘Come on, you lazy . . .’ she muttered to herself.

  But she didn’t finish the sentence. She swayed, her blue eyes glazed, and she would have fallen if she hadn�
��t been clutching her shovel. Sofia reached her first and held her safe, the frail body starting to shake as coughs raked her lungs. She jammed a rag over Anna’s mouth.

  ‘She won’t last,’ Tasha whispered. ‘Her fucking lungs are—’

  ‘Ssh.’ Sofia frowned at her.

  Nina patted Anna’s shoulder and said nothing. Sofia walked Anna back to her patch of the road, helped her scramble up on to its raised surface and gently placed the shovel in her hand. Not once had Anna come even close to meeting the norm in the last month and that meant less food each day in her ration. Sofia shifted a few shovels of rock for her.

  ‘Thanks,’ Anna said and wiped her mouth. ‘Get on with your own work.’ She managed a convincing smile. ‘We’ll be home early today. Before the white-out hits.’

  Sofia stared at her with amazement. Home. How could she bear to call that place home?

  ‘I’ll be fine now,’ Anna assured her.

  You’re not fine, Sofia wanted to shout, and you’re not going to be fine.

  Instead she gazed hard into her friend’s sunken eyes and what she saw there made her chest tighten. Oh, Anna. A frail wisp of a thing, just twenty-eight years old. Too soon to die, much too soon. And that moment, on an ice-bound patch of rock in an empty Siberian wilderness, was when Sofia made the decision. I swear to God, Anna, I’ll get you out of here. If it kills me.

  2

  The white-out came just as Sofia said it would. But this time the guards paid heed to her warning, and before it hit they roped together the grey crocodile of ragged figures and set off on the long mindless trudge back to camp.

  The track threaded its way through unremitting taiga forest, so dark it was like night, the slender columns of pine trees standing like Stalin’s sentinels overseeing the march. The breath of hundreds of women created a strange, disturbing sound in the silence, while their feet shuffled and stumbled over snow-caked ruts.