The Russian Concubine (48 page)

‘Don’t come near my mother anymore.’

‘Go to hell, bitch.’

He walked to the car, his head sunk on his chest, and lashed out at one of the tyres with a brutal kick.

‘Mr Mason.’

He didn’t look at her.

‘Mr Mason, leave Theo Willoughby alone too.’

Mason made a harsh sound that sent a shiver down her spine. ‘Don’t you worry about him,’ he retorted. ‘Feng and his son between them will look after Willoughby.’ His eyes crept back to hers, and the expression in them made her skin crawl. ‘Just like they’ll look after you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Now they know who took care of the Communist.’

‘What Communist?’

‘Don’t play innocent. The one they’re after. The one you nursed.’

Lydia felt ice spike her veins. ‘That’s a lie.’

‘No. Polly told me.’

‘Polly?’

‘Oh yes. Your loyal little friend. Still want to protect her, do you? Yes, she told me and I told them. Right now they’re probably at your house.’ He laughed outright. ‘You didn’t really think I’d give a bitch like you ten thousand dollars, did you? You and your whoring mother can . . .’

But Lydia was already running.

She burst into her house.

‘Mama,’ she shouted. ‘Mama.’

No reply.

The houseboy - what was his name? Deng? - she called out for him. He came running.

‘Yes, Missy Leeja?’

‘My mother, where is she?’

‘I not know.’

She pounced on him and shook his bony shoulders. ‘Is she here?’

‘No, she out.’

‘So early?’

‘She go with Master. In car.’

‘Just the two of them?’

His bright eyes were nervous of her as he held up two fingers. ‘Master and Missy.’

She released him and he scuttled away, hunched like a beetle. Her tongue licked her dry lips. She’d panicked for nothing. But that didn’t mean the danger wasn’t there. It was. She walked into the drawing room and stared out the French windows. How the hell do you fight back when you can’t see your enemy? She leaned her forehead against the icy pane of glass and thought about that. Something broke loose inside her. Everything felt too heavy. Too big.

Her gaze was drawn to the shed, and because it was the nearest she could get to Chang An Lo right now, she opened the glass door and walked down toward it. The air was cold and crisp in her lungs and her head began to clear. She became aware of a crunching noise. A rat was gnawing at one of the wooden planks at the bottom of the shed. Her pulse picked up. What was it after?

‘Scoot,’ she shouted and the creature fled.

The padlock was still locked but the bolt attached to it hung uselessly on the door, the screws prised out. She gave a faint moan. Her hand reached out and touched the door. The wood was warm in the sun. Adrenaline hit her system. She pushed. The door swung open. She screamed.

Blood. So much of it. Red. Sticky. Everywhere. Walls. Ceiling. Floor. On the wire of the hutch and on the sacks. As if someone had painted with blood. The raw stench of it mixed with the stink of faeces but Lydia didn’t notice the smell.

‘Sun Yat-sen,’ she screamed.

The rabbit was lying in the middle of a pool of blood on the floor, his white fur caked with bright crimson. Even his big yellow teeth were red. Lydia knelt beside him, careless of her school uniform, and tears poured down her cheeks.

‘Sun Yat-sen,’ she whispered and lifted him into her arms.

He was still warm. Still alive. But barely. One leg twitched and a strange strangled screech whistled from his small pulsing body. His ears had been hacked off and rammed into his mouth, and his throat was cut. She pulled out the long, soft ears. Held him close. Rocked him and crooned to him. Until the final spasm stiffened his spine. His bloodshot eyes started to glaze.

Her head lowered over him, sobs raked her body. The blow, when it came, wiped out her misery. Darkness took over.

51

Chang An Lo opened his eyes. Something was wrong. He could feel it. Tight in his bowels like wire.

He lay very still, listening.

But the squawking children’s voices as they played in the courtyard masked all other noises, and a soldier’s boot on the stair would pass unnoticed. Silently he rolled out of bed. From under the pillow he took the curl of copper hair and from beneath the mattress he drew the knife.

He stood behind the door. The smell of blood in his nostrils.

Li Mei showed no surprise. Her almond-shaped eyes looked at the blade in his hand but her face remained calm.

‘What is it?’ she asked as she placed the tray she was carrying on a delicate chiffonier of honey-coloured wood.

‘A cold wind in my mind.’

‘All is safe. Tiyo Willbee is an honourable man. You can trust him.’

Chang said nothing. He watched her pour hot water from a teapot with a bamboo handle into a bowl of dried herbs. He noticed she always did it in front of him, and he knew she was showing him that she added nothing extra. He need not fear poisons. He respected her for that. She cared for him well, coolly and calmly, with an observant eye, but he longed for the passion of Lydia’s nursing, her determination to snatch him from the jaws of the gods and to breathe fire into his blood once more. He missed that.

‘Any news?’ he asked softly.

‘The grey bellies are in the harbour, I’m told, hundreds of caps bearing the Kuomintang sun. They are searching ships.’

‘For Foreign Mud?’

‘Who knows why?’ She handed him the bowl and he bowed his thanks. Her hair was scented with cinnamon. ‘People say - but what do people know? - that Communists are being smuggled south by ship to Canton and to Mao Tse-tung’s camps. The sound of guns is in the air today.’

‘Thank you, Li Mei.’

She bowed. ‘I am honoured, Chang An Lo.’ With a rustle of Shantung silk she left the room.

The smell of blood. It was strong in his nostrils.

‘She hasn’t come.’

‘No, Chang, I’m afraid she’s not at school today.’

‘Is that not strange?’

‘No, not really at this time of year. This is always the worst term for sickness and influenza at my school. Well, any school actually.’

‘Yesterday she was well.’

‘Don’t fret, I’m sure she’s fine. To be honest I suspect that blighter Alfred has shut her up at home to keep her away from you. You can’t blame him really, old chap. She’s still young.’

‘I don’t blame him. He is her father now.’

‘Exactly.’

‘She needs guarding.’

‘Quite so.’

‘But not by him.’

Lydia’s leg hurt. Her head throbbed.

But when she forced her eyelids up, the blackness beyond them was as dense as inside her mind. She tried them open and tried them shut. Nothing changed. She moved an arm and felt her elbow crunch against something hard. She touched her hip and thigh. She was naked. Shivering.

That’s what decided it.

It was a nightmare. She was in one of those terrifying caught-in-a-trap nightmares. No clothes. Everyone staring. A splinter of hell. Stuck in her mind.

She closed her eyes and spiralled back down into nothingness, knowing she would soon wake in her own bed.

Strange about the blackness though.

52

‘My father killed himself because of opium.’

Theo was shocked. To hear those words come out of his own mouth. It was not something he’d told anyone before, not even Li Mei. It was as though he’d vomited up a stone that had been stuck hard in his gullet for a long time.

The young Chinese was propped up in bed. He didn’t look good. His gaunt face was grey, lifeless as ash, and bruised shadows circled his eye sockets. His limbs lay loose like a puppet’s at his side, but his black irises were full of some dark emotion. Theo wasn’t sure whether it was hatred or fear. He had a feeling it was hatred. But all Communists hated the foreigners in their land. Who could blame them? Yet it irritated Theo that they conveniently ignored the benefits Westerners brought with them. The industries. Electricity. Trains. Banking expertise. China needed the West more than the West needed China. But it came at a cost.

When the Chinese spoke, there was an edge to his voice. ‘I know this happens here in China. Death and opium, they share the same path. But I did not think it was so in England.’

Theo shrugged. ‘People are the same wherever they live.’

‘Many
fanqui
think otherwise.’

‘Yes, that’s so, and my father was one. He believed with all his soul in the supremacy of the British, and of his own family in particular.’

‘Grief hides in your words. An ancestral shrine for him in your house would honour his spirit.’

‘There’s my elder brother too.’ The words kept flowing now that the stone was dislodged.

A shrine? Why not? Every Chinese home had one to keep the ancestral spirits well fed and happy. Why shouldn’t he? Except of course he might not have a home much longer, and he had a nasty feeling prisons didn’t go in for that kind of thing.

‘He was handsome, my brother Ronald. Had everything. A Cambridge blue and the pride of my father’s heart.’

‘Your father was fortunate.’

‘Not really. Papa gave over the family investment business to him, but it all went belly-up. My brother started on opium to help him sleep at night and . . . Well, it’s the old story. He bankrupted the company and defrauded clients to cover it. So . . .’

Theo silenced his tongue. He could not understand why these memories had surfaced now. He thought they were dead and buried. Why now? Why to this Chinese Communist? Was it because, just like his father before him, both he and Chang An Lo faced the ruin of all their hopes and plans for the future?

‘So?’ Chang prompted quietly.

Theo reached for a cigarette but he didn’t light it, just twisted it between his long fingers. ‘So . . . my father took his shotgun. Killed my brother. In his office, sitting at his desk. Then blew out his own brains. It was . . . frightful. Awful scandal, of course, and Mother took an overdose of something nasty. After the funerals, I came out here. That’s it. Ten years and I’m still here.’

‘China is honoured.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

‘I’m sure it is the opinion of the beautiful Li Mei.’

Theo wanted to believe him.

‘I would ask a question, please?’ Chang said.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Are problems of mixing a European and a Chinese very great? In your world, I mean.’

‘Ah!’ Theo ran a hand over the minute hand-stitching on the Chinese gown he was wearing. He felt a sharp tug of sympathy for the young man. ‘To be brutally honest, yes. The problems are bloody huge.’

Chang shut his eyes.

Theo patted his shoulder. ‘It’s damned hard.’

53

This time the cold was like a shell around her. She pecked at it, picked at it, scraped her nail along it, but it wouldn’t crack. Her mind couldn’t understand why. It struggled. Grew weary. The organs of her body were shutting down, she could feel them inside her, one by one, going to sleep. Abandoning her. The cold. They hated it. It was only when she became aware of a sudden warmth between her legs that she woke up.

Her eyes opened. To total blackness. She tried to churn her thoughts into action, but all they wanted was sleep. Where had all this blackness come from?

Things came to her in bits and pieces. A pain in her leg. Her head sore and her cheek on something hard. Icy skin. Her knees up under her chin. Gradually it dawned on her that she was lying on her side curled up in a tight ball. Her hand risked stretching out into the darkness but it couldn’t reach far because there were cold metal walls all around her. Her heart thundered in her ears.

Where was she?

She tried to sit up. It took three attempts. And when she’d done it, she felt worse. Not because of the pain in her leg that felt as if someone had kicked it. Nor because her head started to spin inside a crazy kaleidoscope, lights flashing behind her eyes, reds and blues and fierce brain-searing yellows. No, it was because she touched the ceiling one inch above her head and knew where she was. She was in a box. A metal box.

They put me in a metal crate.

Three months, perhaps more.

Chang An Lo’s words.

Her stomach spasmed with fear and she vomited, sour acid in her throat. It sprayed over her knees, and the sticky warmth of it recalled to her sluggish mind the earlier warmth between her legs. Her fingers explored along the metal base under her. It was wet. She had peed.

Her mind went white. She started to scream.

She was fighting her way through cobwebs. They stuck to her eyeballs, and a spider with a red speckled body and yellow pincers ran up inside her nostril.

She opened her eyes. And immediately wished herself back in the spider nightmare again. This was worse. This was real. Her body struggled into a crouching position and her hands inched along the four walls to discover the dimensions of her miniature cell. Long enough to sit up but not to straighten her legs, wide enough to touch both walls with her elbows at the same time. An inch of headroom when she was seated in a hunched sort of position. She then examined her own body. Her knees. They smelled. She remembered the vomit. The stink of stale urine scored the membranes of her nostrils, a lump on the back of her head, and high on her left thigh another one the size of a saucer. But no broken skin. No broken bones. No missing fingers.

It could be worse.

How? How in God’s name could this devil’s rat hole possibly be worse? How?

She could be dead. Think of that.

The cold didn’t increase. It didn’t improve but it didn’t get worse. That was something. She worried about the constant shivering. It was using up so much energy, draining her reserves. She was exhausted already. Or was that the fear?

Her mind kept blanking out.

She’d be in the middle of trying to work out how long she might have been a captive in the dark, when her mind would suddenly slip away from her. Blank out totally. That terrified her almost as much as the box. Brain damage? From the blow to the head.
Please, no, not that.
Or was it sheer terror? Her mind escaping.

To find a tiny scrap of warmth she wrapped her arms around her knees and huddled tight, stroking her shins for comfort.

Breathe. In. Hold for the count of ten. Out. Slow and smooth. In. Hold. Count. Out.

Control. Keep control. Concentrate.

Her thoughts felt like glass. The slightest touch and they shattered. Panic stalked her. Sprang out at her from the dark corners when she wasn’t looking.

‘Chang An Lo,’ she murmured, and was astonished at the reassurance the sound of her own voice gave her. ‘How did you keep yourself sane?’

She’d worked out three things. One was that she’d only been inside Box - she thought of it as a creature that had swallowed her whole - for less than a day. Otherwise she’d have peed more than once, though admittedly she’d not had anything to drink.
Don’t think of that.
Her mouth was dust-dry and her throat parched. The screaming hadn’t helped. Stupid that. Wasting strength. Anyway. Nor had she done . . . her brain shied away from the prospect . . . done more serious toilet matters. So. Less than twenty-four hours then.

The second thing she’d worked out was that she must be underground. In a cellar maybe. Or a secret dungeon. It was the temperature that made her decide that. It never varied. A constant cold, never warmer by day or icier at night. Not that she had any idea whether it was day or night inside Box. Just dark. And more dark. Cold. And more cold. No sounds either. If she’d been anywhere aboveground there would be sounds. Not this dead weight of silence.

Third thing. There must be air holes. Must be. Or she’d be dead by now. Her fingers started the search.