The Russian Concubine

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.