The Russian Concubine (38 page)

38

Exhaustion finally claimed her. Lydia woke with a start to find herself still in the chair but sprawled forward on the bed, her weight pinning down one side of Chang. She jumped off in alarm. His hand, she mustn’t crush his hand.

It was dark and cold and her mind felt thick as treacle. She stood up, stripped off the clothes she had been wearing for the last forty-eight hours, pulled over her head one of the two new embroidered nightdresses that lay in her otherwise empty chest of drawers, and lifted the sheet.

She slid into the bed. Instantly all desire for sleep vanished. She lay on her side, curving her body to fit beside his, aware of his nakedness and the thin cotton of her nightdress between them. She let her arm rest across his waist and her cheek lie against his shoulder, so that she could smell the cooling camphor on his skin. She breathed it in.

‘Chang An Lo,’ she whispered, just to hear his name.

She closed her eyes and experienced a warm bubbling sensation in her chest. Happiness? Was this what happiness felt like?

She dreamed bad dreams.

Her mother was fixing a metal collar around Chang’s neck. He was naked and Valentina was dragging him on the end of a heavy chain through great drifts of snow. It was in the heart of a forest with wild winds and the howling of wolves, the sky red and bleeding onto the white snow beneath, like scarlet rain. There was a man on a great horse. A green greatcoat. A rifle. Bullets flying through the air, slamming into the pine trees, into her mother’s legs. She screamed. And one bullet tore into Chang’s bare chest. Another lodged between two of Lydia’s own ribs. She felt no pain but couldn’t breathe; she was gasping for air, filling up with ice in her lungs. She tried to shout but no sound came out, she couldn’t breathe . . .

She shuddered awake.

The room was full of daylight, sweet and normal daylight that steadied her racing pulse. She turned her head and gasped aloud.

Chang’s black eyes were staring right at her, no more than a hand’s breadth from her own.

‘Hello.’ His voice was a whisper.

‘Hello.’ She smiled at him, a wide welcoming grin. ‘You’re back.’

For a long moment he studied her face, then nodded very faintly and murmured something too low for her to catch. Abruptly she became acutely aware of her leg draped over his, of her arm warm against his skin and her hip tight next to his, and suddenly she was embarrassed. She blushed fiercely and slid out of the bed. When she was on the floor she turned to face him and gave a formal little bow, hands together, a brief lowering of her head.

‘I am pleased to see you awake, Chang An Lo.’

His lips moved, life returning to them, but no words came out.

‘I would like to give you medicine and food,’ she said softly. ‘You need to eat.’

Again he gave the faint nod, and closed his eyes. But she knew he was not asleep. She felt in a panic. But a totally different kind of panic from before. She told herself it was a kind of fluttery on-the-surface panic because she feared she may have offended Chang An Lo with the forwardness of her actions, made him disgusted with her alley-cat ways, and that he would not want her to nurse him or feed him or even touch his body, that body she knew so well now. But all of this was nothing like the deep-down panic of before when she thought he would die, that he would leave her with just his bones and none of himself, that she would never see again the way his black eyes . . .

Stop it. Stop it.

He was awake. That meant everything. Awake.

‘I’ll fetch some hot water,’ she said and scuttled downstairs.

Her touch was like sunlight to him. It warmed his skin. Inside, Chang felt cold and empty, like a reptile after a night of frost, and it was the touch of her fingers that brought life flowing back to his limbs. He started to feel again.

With feeling came pain.

He fought to centre his mind. To use the pain as a source of energy. He focused on her fingers as she peeled back the bandages. They were not beautiful. The nails were square where they should have been oval and her thumbs were oddly long, but her hands moved with a confidence that was beautiful. He watched. They would heal him, those hands.

But when he saw his own mutilated hands, the pain broke free from his grip on it and exploded in his head. It blew him apart. He tumbled in pieces back down into the slime.

He opened his eyes.

‘Lydia.’

She didn’t look up from where she was bent over a metal bowl stirring something strongly scented inside it. A thin wintry ray of sunlight from the window trickled over her hair and down one side of her face, so that she seemed to shine.

‘Lydia.’

Still she ignored him.

He closed his eyes and thought about that. It took some time to occur to him that he had not moved his lips. He tried again, this time concentrating on working the muscles of his mouth. They felt stiff, as though they had not been used for a long time.

‘Lydia.’

Her head shot up. ‘Hello, again. How are you feeling?’

‘Like I’m alive.’

She smiled. ‘Good. Stay that way.’

‘I will.’

‘Good.’

She stood beside the bed looking down at him, the spoon in her hand frozen above the bowl and dripping a purplish liquid from its edge. He could hear the
ping
of each drop as it hit the bowl. She kept standing there, just staring at him. Hours passed in his head. Her face filled his eyes and floated through the void of his mind. Hers were large round eyes. A long nose. It was the face of a
fanqui.

‘Do you need something for the pain?’

He blinked. She was still there, the spoon dripping in her hand, her gaze fixed on his face. He shook his head.

‘Tell me about Tan Wah,’ he said.

As she told him, her words brought grief to his heart but it was her eyes, not his, that filled with tears.

This time he did not open his eyes.

If he opened them, she’d stop. She was gently massaging his legs. They were like sticks of dead bamboo, fit for nothing but the fire, but gradually he could feel the heat starting to build in them, the blood creeping back into the wasted muscles. His flesh was waking up.

She was humming. The sound pleased his ears even though it was a foreign tune that had none of the sweet cadences of Chinese music. It flowed from her as effortlessly as from a bird and somehow cooled the fever in his brain.

Thank you, Kuan Yin, dear goddess of mercy. Thank you for bringing me the fox girl.

‘Where is your mother?’

The thought slipped into his mind as he awoke. This was the first time it had occurred to him. Until now his sluggish fevered mind had not thought beyond this room. Beyond the girl. But after another night of fitful, broken sleep that was a jagged nightmare of black sorrow in his body and black grief in his heart for Tan Wah, he knew he was more alert.

He started to see dangers.

The girl smiled at him. It was meant to reassure. But behind the smile she was anxious, he could see it.

‘She is away in Datong with her new husband. She won’t be back until Saturday.’ As an afterthought she added, ‘Today is Tuesday.’

‘And this house?’

‘It is our new home. There’s no one here but us.’

‘Servants are not
no one
.’

The skin of her cheeks turned a dull red. ‘The cook lives in an annex but I hardly see him, and I have told the houseboy and gardener not to come for a week. I am not a fool, Chang An Lo. I know it was not a well-wisher who did this to you.’

‘Forgive me, Lydia Ivanova, the fever makes my tongue foolish. ’

‘I forgive you,’ she said and laughed.

He did not know why she laughed, but it warmed some cold place inside him and he slept.

‘Wake up, Chang, wake up.’ A hand was shaking him. ‘It’s all right, shh, don’t shout, you’re safe. Wake . . .’

He woke.

He was drenched in sweat. His heart was roaring in his chest. Red fury burned the sockets of his eyes and his mouth was as dry as the west wind.

‘You were having a nightmare.’

She was leaning over him, her hand on his mouth, silencing his lips. He could taste her skin. Slowly his mind clawed its way to the surface. He kicked away the feel of knives at his genitals and the smell of burning flesh in his nostrils.

‘Breathe,’ she murmured.

He dragged air deep into his lungs, again and then again. His head was spinning but his eyes were open. It was dark, with just a whisper of light from a street lamp slinking under the curtains, enough for him to make out shapes in the room, the clothes cupboard, the table with the mirror and the medicine bottles. Her. He could see the slender silhouette of her, hair all rumpled and wild-edged. Her hand had left his mouth and was hovering above his damp forehead, fearful to touch. He breathed once more, picked up a rhythm for it.

‘You’re shivering,’ she said.

‘I need a bottle.’

There was a slight pause. ‘I’ll get it.’

She turned on the light. Not the overhead one with the cream shade and silk fringe but the small green lamp that was on the table of medicines. He would have preferred the dark for this task. She came with the wide-necked bottle and lifted the quilt and blankets from his body. He rolled on his side, felt his head swim from just that simple movement, and said nothing while she slid the bottle over his penis. The flow of urine was laboured and sporadic; it took time, too long. He was aware of her embarrassment, just as he was aware of the nakedness of his loins where she had clipped away the black hair when he was unconscious. He hated her doing this, but his own hands were bandaged into useless swollen stumps. Neither he nor she were yet used to it, and the sound of the liquid trickling into the glass bottle made his ears burn.

At the end when she held the bottle up to the light and said, ‘Looks like a good vintage,’ he had no idea what the girl meant.

‘What?’

‘A good vintage.’ She grinned at him. ‘Like wine.’

‘Much too dark.’

‘Less blood in it than last time though.’

‘The medicines are working.’

‘All of them.’ She laughed as she gestured to the colourful row of bottles and potions and packages.

On the table they formed a strange mixture of cultures, Chinese and Western, and yet she seemed totally at ease with both in a way he admired. Her mind was so open and ready to make use of whatever came her way. Just like a fox.

He lay back on the pillow. Sweat trickled from his forehead. ‘Thank you.’

The effort had exhausted him, but he remembered to smile at her. Westerners threw smiles around like chicken feathers, another sharp divide in customs, but he had seen how much a smile mattered to her. He gave her one now.

‘I am humbled,’ he said.

‘Don’t be.’

‘Look at me. I am empty. A hawk without wings. You should despise such weakness.’

‘No, Chang An Lo, don’t say that. I’ll tell you what I see. I see a brave fighter. One who should be dead by now but isn’t because he will never give in.’

‘You blind your mind with words.’

‘No. You blind your mind with sickness. Wait, Chang An Lo, wait for me to heal you.’ She reached out and rested a cool hand on his burning forehead. ‘Time for more quinine.’

Throughout the rest of the night she dosed him and bathed him and battled the fever. Sometimes he heard her speaking to him and at others he heard himself speaking to her, but he had no idea what he said or why he said it.

‘Spirit of nitre and acetate of ammonium with camphor water.’

He recalled her voice wrapping around those difficult words as she spooned things into his mouth, but they were just sounds with no meaning.

‘Mr Theo said the herbalist claimed this Chinese brew will work miracles on a fevered brain, so . . . no, please, no, don’t spit it out, let’s try again, open up, yes, that’s it. Good.’

More sounds.
Mistertheo.
What is
mistertheo?

Always the cooling cloth on his skin. The smell of vinegar and herbs. Lemon water on his dry lips. Nightmares stealing his mind. But at dawn he could feel the fire in his blood at last begin to stutter. That was when he started to shiver and shake so violently he bit his tongue and tasted blood. He felt her sit beside him on the bed, felt the pillow dip under her as she rested back against the wooden headboard and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She held him tight.

The doorbell rang. The hairs on his neck rose and he saw Lydia lift her head as though scenting the air. Their eyes met. They both knew he was trapped.

‘It’ll be Polly,’ she said in a firm voice. She went over to the door. ‘I’ll get rid of her, don’t worry.’

He nodded and she left, closing the bedroom door behind her. Whoever this
Polly
person was, he called a thousand curses down on her head.

39

‘Good morning, Miss Ivanova. I hope I haven’t called too early.’

‘Alexei Serov. I . . . didn’t expect you.’

The Russian was standing on the doorstep, tall and languid as ever in his fur-collared coat, but he was the last person she wanted to see right now.

‘I was concerned about you,’ he said.

‘Concerned? Why?’

‘After our last meeting. You were very upset by the death of your companion in the street.’

‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry, my mind is . . . Yes, it was unpleasant and you were very kind. Thank you.’ She took a small step back, preparing to shut the door, but he hadn’t finished.

‘I called at your previous address and Olga Petrovna Zarya told me you live here now.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She said your mother has remarried.’

‘Yes.’

‘My congratulations to her.’ He gave her a small bow, and she thought how much more graceful Chang was at that movement.

‘Thank you.’

He gave her the edge of a smile. ‘Though your mother wasn’t so pleased to see me at your previous house, if I recall correctly.’

‘No.’

An awkward silence settled between them that she did nothing to break.

‘Am I disturbing you?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I’m sorry but I’m in the middle of something at the moment.’

‘Then I apologise. I won’t detain you any longer. I have been very busy myself or I would have called on you before now to make sure you are well.’

‘Busy?’ Her interest sharpened. ‘With the Kuomintang forces?’

‘That’s right. Good-bye, Miss Ivanova.’

‘Wait.’ She found a smile. ‘I apologise for keeping you standing on the doorstep like this. How rude of me. Maybe you’d like a cup of tea. Everyone needs a break sometime.’

‘Thank you. I’d like that.’

‘Please, do come in.’

Now that she had him in a chair with a cup of tea in his hand, a beautiful bone china one with a handle so fine you could see through it, Lydia was having difficulty finding out what she wanted to know. As often as she steered the conversation toward military matters, he sidestepped the subject and talked instead about the Chinese opera he’d seen the previous evening. Even when she asked outright about the numerous Communist posters she’d seen in the town demanding the right of access for the Chinese to the parks in the International Settlement, he just laughed that lazy superior laugh of his.

‘They’ll be wanting access to our clubs and croquet lawns next,’ he said.

She had no idea whether he was teasing her or was deadly serious. His tone was amused and languorous but she wasn’t fooled. His green eyes were quick and observant, watching her, taking in at a glance her new surroundings. She had the feeling he was playing a game with her. She sipped her tea warily.

‘So the Communists are still active in Junchow,’ she commented, ‘despite the efforts of the elite Kuomintang troops.’

‘It would seem so. But driven into holes in the river bank like rats. The Kuomintang flag flies everywhere to remind people who is in charge now.’ He smiled through half-closed eyes. ‘At least it’s a fine banner to display and cheers the place up a bit with its bright colours.’

‘But do you know what the flag’s colours mean?’

‘They’re just colours.’

‘No. In China everything has a meaning.’

‘So?’ He leaned back in his chair, one arm exactly placed on each armrest. He looked to her just like the young tsar must have looked on his throne in the Winter Palace, and she resented his arrogant manner. ‘Enlighten me, Miss Ivanova.’

‘The red body of the flag represents China’s blood and suffering. ’

‘And the white sun?’

‘Purity.’

‘The blue background?’

‘Justice.’

‘Interesting. You seem to know more than most about China.’

‘I know that the Black Snakes of Junchow are fighting both the Communists and the Kuomintang for control of the council.’

For the first time his green eyes widened. She felt she had scored a point.

‘Miss Ivanova, you are a young Russian girl. Where has someone like you heard of the Black Snakes?’

‘I listen. I see the tattoo. Just because I am female and not yet seventeen doesn’t mean I am unaware of the political situation here. I am not one of the delicate flowers in your salons who sit at home all day doing embroidery or sipping champagne, Alexei Serov. I live in this world.’

He leaned forward, and all sign of laughter was gone from his face. ‘Miss Ivanova, I have seen the way you take risks. I urge you to avoid any contact with the Black Snakes. Right now they are even more dangerous than ever.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because the father and son at the head of it have split. The father publicly whipped Po Chu for disobedience and now Po Chu is gathering his own tong around him, trying to wheedle his way into an alliance with the Kuomintang. But no one is trusted. Everyone plays off against one another, shifting pieces like a chess game.’

‘Will the son seize control from the father?’

‘I don’t know. He is reckless. Already he has acquired the means to create huge problems.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Explosives. He derailed a train carrying explosives from Funan Province last week, and a captain in the Kuomintang Army told me only yesterday that his spies say all hell is about to break loose.’

‘Does that mean Chiang Kai-shek will send in more troops?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘You will therefore be even busier.
Advising.
That’s what you do, isn’t it? You advise the Kuomintang on military strategy.’

‘That is correct.’

‘Does it never occur to you that they are no better than the savage warlords were? That Chiang rules like a dictator and you are helping him?’

Instantly Alexei Serov assumed that irritating half-smile and leaned back in his chair once more. He picked up his cup but he had forgotten it was already empty, and he placed it back down on the table at his side.

‘You may be remarkably well informed about Chinese matters, Miss Ivanova, but it’s obvious you are woefully ignorant about one aspect. China, like Russia, is a vast country and is made up of a great diversity of peoples and tribes who would happily cut each other’s throats if a strong dictator like Chiang Kai-shek did not hold them together with an iron fist. The Communists are full of fine ideals, but in a country like this they would wreak havoc if they ever got to power. But they will never succeed. Their answers are far too simplistic. So yes, I work hard for the political and military system that will root them out of their holes and destroy them.’

Lydia stood up abruptly. ‘You are obviously very busy. Don’t let me detain you.’

He blinked, surprised. Then he inclined his head courteously. ‘Of course. Excuse me. I recall that you said you were in the middle of something when I arrived.’ He rose to his feet, his long frame moving elegantly inside his immaculate suit, his brown cropped hair at odds with the smoothness of the rest of him.

Lydia became aware of her own rumpled dress and uncombed hair. She was about to run a hand through her mane but stopped herself. What this man thought of her did not matter one bit. He was rude and arrogant and a supporter of a ruthless dictator. To hell with him. Her mother was right.

At the front door she handed him his coat and felt obliged to hold out her hand. ‘Good-bye, Alexei Serov, and thank you again for your assistance.’

He held her hand briefly and studied it as it lay in his own, as if he would discover its secrets.

Lydia withdrew it.

His green eyes, lazy and half-closed once more, settled on hers in a speculative way. ‘My mother, Countess Natalia Serova, is holding a party next week. Maybe you would like to join us? Monday at eight. Do come.’ He laughed, a light teasing sound. ‘We can sit and talk about troop movements.’

Behind him in his car on the gravel drive a Chinese chauffeur in military uniform sat patiently behind the steering wheel, and a small Kuomintang flag fluttered on the bonnet in the icy breeze.

‘I’ll think about it,’ Lydia said and shut the door.

She ran up the stairs two at a time. The bedroom door was closed, but she opened it in a rush and was already speaking as she entered the room.

‘Chang, it’s all right, I . . .’

She stopped. The bed was empty. The sheet thrown back and the quilt gone.

‘Chang?’

The air was cold. She felt a chill wind brush her cheek. The window was wide open and the curtains billowing.

‘No,’ she breathed and rushed over to the sill. Outside there was no sign of his broken body on the terrace beneath. Her room looked out onto the back garden, which appeared bleak and bare, no movement except a foraging magpie. Empty. A tight pain gripped her chest.

‘Chang,’ she called, but softly.

Something made a noise behind her. She swivelled around and watched the door swing shut. Behind it, tight against the wall where he had been hidden by the open door, stood Chang An Lo. His face was white. But his body was wrapped in the peach quilt and from his right wrist dangled the unraveled twists of a bandage. In his swollen fingers were the scissors she used on the bandages, the long blades held like a dagger.