The Concubine's Secret Read Online Free Page A

life.’
    She’d had no idea it would be like this. This bad. Being parted from him, not knowing where he was or even whether he was still alive. No word of any kind. Five months and eleven days it had been. Of this. This agony. She’d known it would be hard but not that it would be this… unbearable. That she’d forget how to think, to breathe, to be. How could she still be Lydia Ivanova when all that was best in her was with him back there in China?
    Chang had saved her life. It happened in the colourful old town of Junchow on the wide open plains of northern China. In an alleyway she’d got herself caught between an old man latched like a leech on to her wrist and a painted lady, both intent on kidnapping her, but Chang had come flying like a black-haired dragon through the air. And after that, she’d belonged to him utterly. It was as simple as that. Despite the anger and tears of those around them who fought to break them up, they had fallen in love. But now he was away from her and in the kind of danger she couldn’t bear to think about.
    Oh my love, take care. Take great care. For my sake.
    He was a Communist revolutionary fighting in Mao Tse Tung’s rebel Red Army in China, and time and again when she lay awake in the dark hours before dawn she brooded over whether she should be there at his side. Instead of traipsing across Russia, searching for a father she hadn’t seen since she was five years old. But she and Chang had agreed. It wasn’t possible. She would be as much a danger to him as one of Chiang Kai-shek’s bullets. If she were in China with him, she would always be his weak spot, distracting him, the pressure point his enemies could use.
    No, my love; even though it was like watching blood flow from my own artery, I had to let you go.
    Her fingers brushed the rose-coloured talisman he’d given her and she recalled the last time he came to her, standing tall and strong in the doorway of the old shed. His black hair tousled by the wind, an air of wildness about him, a grubby green blanket thrown over his shoulders in place of a coat. His eyes wanting her.
    I must leave you here, the light of my soul, he’d said. Leave you safe.
    Safe? She started to prowl back and forth across the narrow space. What was the point of being safe, if it meant being without the one person who made her blood sing? Was that why she kept taking the risks that Alexei so hated? Poor Alexei, she knew she drove him mad at times. Her half-brother had been brought up as part of a privileged elite, first in the scented salons of Russia and then in China. He was used to order and discipline. Not this uncertainty, not this chaos. And it didn’t help that he and the Cossack loathed each other, while she was caught in the middle between them. It was Liev Popkov who had brought the news from Russia to Junchow, to her mother, Valentina; news that the husband she thought had died in 1917 during their escape as White Russians from the fury of the Bolsheviks was, in fact, alive in a prison camp.
    How he had discovered this she never found out, but Lydia believed him implicitly. He’d helped her in China when she’d been searching for Chang An Lo in the dangerous docklands of Junchow. Popkov had protected her fiercely, throwing her money back at her when she’d offered it for his services as a bodyguard. It was only later when she learned that he – and his father before him – had been devoted servants to her grandfather in St Petersburg in the days of the Tsar that she understood. She felt a rush of affection for the big Cossack. His devotion touched her. Deeply. She trusted him, and that was something she valued above all else, it was so rare. Trust.
    Can I trust Alexei?
    Lydia shivered and moved over to the narrow window in her room where she stared out for a long time at the vast winter sky, watching the stars glitter in the darkness and lights shimmer in houses as the small town of Selyansk settled down for the night. Once