The Concubine's Secret Read Online Free Page B

again she felt the landscape of Russia slide into her heart, calming her and chiming with some image already deep inside her. She loved this country, loved its magnificent tortured soul. Just to have her feet stamping on Russian soil after the long absence in China satisfied some intense need that she hadn’t even realised was there.
    Did Alexei feel it too? That need? She wasn’t sure. He was hard to read. But she was getting better at it, and even though he believed he kept his thoughts hidden behind that veil of indifference – using that rigid self-discipline of his that she both envied and loathed – she was learning to spot a faint rise of an eyebrow. Or a tightening of a cheek muscle. Or a fractional twitch of the lips when amused.
    Oh yes, Alexei, you’re not as inscrutable as you would like. I hunt around inside you, sniffing out the secrets you try to hide. We may have the same father but our mothers were very different. Nor am I as blind as you think. You hated it when I kissed your cheek tonight, didn’t you? You couldn’t get out of this room fast enough. As if I’d bitten you. Don’t you want me as a sister? Is that it? Am I not what you would have wished for? Have I spilled too much of our aristocratic blood from my veins and filled them instead with the instincts of a wild alley cat, as my mother used to claim?
    Though Lydia and Alexei had been living in the same town in China for many years, they had moved in very different circles and their paths had never crossed. It was only when her mother’s new fiancé had introduced her to the sophisticated glamour and bright lights of the elite society in Junchow that Lydia had met Alexei. In a French restaurant, she recalled. And she’d thought him arrogant and cold.
    Yet he’d been generous with his help when she needed it, and after her mother’s death only a few months ago she’d learned the truth in a letter Valentina had left for her. That Alexei’s mother might be the wealthy Countess Serova, but his father was Jens Friis, the Danish engineer. The affair happened in St Petersburg long before he married Valentina, but Alexei had been as shocked as Lydia herself by the discovery that they were related. She knew it had shaken his world as much as it had shaken hers. Both had been an only child until that point, dealing with the loneliness in their own different ways, but now… She conjured up the image of his straight back, his neat brown hair and controlled smile… Now she had a brother. One who was as committed to finding their father as she was.
    A sudden ache in her throat caught her unawares at the thought of her father locked in one of Stalin’s brutal prison camps. She rested her forehead against the icy pane and the shock of the cold glass jerked her mind away from places it didn’t want to go. She focused on tomorrow. The station. Another long day for her between Alexei and Popkov. It was wrong what she’d done in the bar, using whispers about Alexei to bait the Cossack.
    ‘See him up there, Popkov? Watching you.’
    Her words blew hot on the black hairs in his ears.
    ‘He wants you to lose. He’s laughing, Popkov, sneering… Da , you’re winning now… He’s gone. Couldn’t bear to watch you win.’
    But she couldn’t have let him lose. He’d have just set about getting himself drunk out of his skull for a week, refusing to travel, refusing even to speak. It had happened before. Only grunts would come out of his mouth and only vodka would go in.
    She turned abruptly to the bed where the remaining coins lay in two equal heaps. One pile she tipped inside one of her mittens, burying it deep in her pack the way a fox stores food for the winter. The other she folded up in the green cloth, ready for Popkov in the morning. The morning. Another dawn to get through. She never felt lonelier than when she woke up to find Chang An Lo wasn’t there in bed beside her, but maybe tomorrow they would at last get out of this tired little town.