He was waiting for her when she came out. She knew he would be. His back was toward her as he stood staring out at the small graveyard that lay behind the church, and yet he seemed to sense the moment she was there because he said without turning his head, ‘How do the spirits of your dead find their way home?’
‘What?’
He turned, smiled at her, and bowed. So polite. So correct. Lydia felt a sharp spike of disappointment. He was putting a distance between them that hadn’t been there before, his mouth unsmiling, as though she were a stranger in the street. Surely she was more than that. Wasn’t she?
She lifted her chin and gave him the kind of cool smile that Mr Theo gave to Polly when he was being sarcastic.
‘You came,’ she said and glanced casually away at St Saviour’s bell tower.
‘Of course I came.’
Something in his voice made her look back. He’d moved closer, so silent she’d heard no footsteps, yet here he was, near enough to touch. And his long black eyes were talking to her, even though his mouth was silent. His face was turned slightly away, but his gaze was fixed on hers. She smiled at him, a real smile this time, and saw him blink in that slow way a cat does when the sunlight is too bright.
‘How are you?’ she asked.
‘I am well.’
But the look he gave her said otherwise, and as though he were perched on a cliff edge, his nerves seemed to tighten, his muscles tense under the thin black tunic. It was as if he were about to jump off. Then he gave a strange little sigh, and with no more than a flicker of a shy smile he turned his head. For the first time she saw the right side of it.
‘Your face . . . ,’ she gasped, then stopped. She knew that the Chinese regarded personal comments as rude. ‘Is it painful?’
‘No,’ he said.
But he had to be lying. That side of his head was split and swollen. A livid black bruise, shot through with dried blood, ran along his hairline from his forehead down to his ear. The sight of it made Lydia furious.
‘That policeman,’ she said angrily. ‘I’ll report him for . . .’
‘Doing his duty?’ He did not smile this time, his black eyes serious. ‘I think it would not be wise.’
‘But you need treatment,’ Lydia insisted. ‘I’ll fetch Mrs Yeoman, she’ll know what to do.’ She swung back in the direction of the hall, in a hurry to bring help.
‘Please, no.’ His voice was soft but insistent.
She stopped, looked at him. Looked at him hard, this figure she knew and yet didn’t know. He stood very still. Holding something in. What? What more was he keeping from her? His stillness was as elegant as his movements had been in the alley, his shoulders muscular but his hips narrower than her own. Horrible black rubber shoes on his feet.
In the hall earlier, and even when he greeted her, she had not seen the damaged side of his face, and she realised now that he had kept it turned away from her. What if her reaction was all wrong in his eyes? To him it implied . . . what? That he was weak? Or unable to care for himself ? She shook her head, knowing this was a strange and delicate world she was entering, as unfamiliar to her as his language. She had to tread carefully. She nodded to indicate acceptance of his wishes, then turned her face toward the tombstones, neat and orderly with carnations in little vases. This world she understood.
‘Their spirits go straight to heaven,’ she said with a gesture at the rectangles of grass. ‘It doesn’t matter where they die, if they are Christians, but if they’re wicked, they go to hell. That’s what the priests tell us, anyway.’ She glanced over at him. Instead of looking at the graves, he was watching her. She stared right back at him and said, ‘As for me, I’ll be going straight to hell.’ And she laughed.
For a moment he looked shocked, and then he gave her his shy smile. ‘You are mocking me, I think.’
Oh God, she’d got it wrong again. How do you talk to someone so different? In all her life in Junchow the only Chinese people she’d ever spoken to were shopkeepers and servants, but conversations like ‘How much?’ and ‘A pound of soybeans, please,’ didn’t really count. Her dealings with Mr Liu at the pawnshop were the nearest she’d come to communicating properly with a Chinese native, and even those were spiced with danger. She must start again.
Very formally, hands together and eyes on the ground, she gave a little bow. ‘No, I’m not mocking you. I wish to thank you. You saved me in the alleyway and I am grateful. I owe you thanks.’
He did not move, not a muscle shifted in his face or his body, but something changed somewhere deep inside him and she could see it. Though she didn’t know exactly what it was. Just that it was as if a closed place had opened, and she felt a warmth flow from him that took her by surprise.
‘No,’ he said, eyes fixed intently on hers. ‘You do not owe me your thanks.’ He came one step closer to her, so close she could see tiny secret flecks of purple in his eyes. ‘They would have cut your throat when they were done with you. You owe me your life.’
‘My life is my own. It belongs to no one but me.’
‘And I owe you mine. Without you I would be dead. A bullet would be in my head now if you had not come out of the night when you did.’ He bowed once more, very low this time. ‘I owe you my life.’
‘Then we’re even.’ She laughed, uncertain how serious this was meant to be. ‘A life for a life.’
He looked at her, but she couldn’t fathom the emotion in his eyes this time, it was so still and dark. He said nothing and she wasn’t sure how much he’d understood, especially when he asked, ‘Does your Mrs Yeoman own a needle and thread?’
‘Oh, I expect so. Do you want me to fetch it?’
‘Yes, please. It would be kind.’
Her eyes scanned his clothes, a V-necked tunic and loose trousers, but could see no holes in them, so maybe it was for some sort of blood-brother ritual, to sew their lives together. The idea sent a flare of heat racing up her spine, and for the first time since she’d been herded into the concert room last night by Commissioner Lacock himself, the tight ball inside her lungs loosened and she could breathe.
10
‘My name is Lydia Ivanova.’
She held out a hand to him and he knew what she was expecting. He’d seen them do it, the foreigners. Seizing each other’s hands in greeting. A disgusting habit. No self-respecting Chinese would be so rude as to touch another, especially someone he didn’t know. Who would want to hold a hand that may have just come from gutting a pig or stroking a wife’s private parts? Barbarians were such filthy creatures.
Yet the sight of her small hand, pale as a lily and waiting for him, was curiously inviting. He wanted to touch it. To learn the feel of it.
He shook hands. ‘I am called Chang An Lo.’
It was like holding a bird in his hand, warm and soft. With one squeeze he could have crushed its fragile bones. But he didn’t want to. He experienced an unfamiliar need to protect this wild fluttering little creature in his hand.
She withdrew it as easily as she had given it and looked around her. He had led her out of the settlement along the back of the American sector and down a dirt track out to Lizard Creek, a small wooded inlet to the west of town. Here the morning sun lazed on the surface of the water and the birch trees offered dappled shade to the flat grey rocks. Lizards flicked and flashed over them like leaves in a breeze. Beyond the creek the land stretched flat and boggy after last night’s rain all the way north to the distant mountains. They shimmered blue in the summer heat, but Chang knew that somewhere hidden deep within the crouching tiger was a Red heart that was beating stronger every day. One day soon it would flood the country with its blood.
‘This place is beautiful,’ the fox girl said. ‘I had no idea it existed.’
She was smiling. She was pleased. And that created a strange contentment in his chest. He watched the way she dipped a hand into the gently flowing creek and laughed at a swallow that flashed its wings as it skimmed the water. Insects hummed in the heat and two
crickets bickered somewhere in the reeds.
‘I come here because the water is clean,’ he explained to her. ‘See how clear it is, it lives and sings. Look at that fish.’ A silver swirl and it was gone. ‘But when this water joins the great Peiho River, the spirits leave it.’
‘Why?’ She sounded puzzled. Did she know so little?
‘Because it fills up with black oil from the foreigners’ gunboats and poisons from their factories. The spirits would die in the brown filth of the Peiho.’
She gave him a look but said nothing, just sat down on a rock and tossed a stone into the shallows. She stretched out her legs, bare and slender, toward the water and he noticed a hole in the bottom of one of her shoes. The fiery hair was hidden away under a straw hat, and he was sorry for that. The hat looked old, battered, like her shoes. Her hair always looked new and he wanted to see its flames again. She was watching a small brown bird tugging at a grub in a dead branch at her feet.
‘Your English is excellent, you know.’
She spoke softly and he wasn’t sure if it was not to disturb the bird or because she was suddenly nervous alone with a man in this isolated spot. She had shown courage in coming here with him. No Chinese girl would ever take a risk like this. They’d sooner feed their pet turtles to a cobra. Yet she didn’t look nervous at all. Her eyes shone with expectation.
He moved to the edge of the water, keeping his distance from her so that she wouldn’t become alarmed, and squatted down on a patch of grass. It was still damp.
‘I am honoured that you think my English acceptable,’ he said.
While her attention was on the brown bird, he eased the rubber shoe off his right foot. Pain crashed around inside his skull. He began to unwind the blood-soaked cloth that was holding the flesh of his foot together.
‘I had an English tutor for many years,’ he told her. ‘When I was young. He taught me well.’ The putrid smell on the cloth rose to his nostrils. ‘And my uncle went to university at Harvard. That’s in America. He always insisted that English is the language of the future and would speak nothing else to me.’
‘Really? Just like my mother. She speaks God knows how many languages.’
‘Except Mandarin?’
She laughed, a bright ripple of sound that sent the bird up into a tree, but for Chang the sound of her laughter merged with the song of the river and soothed the burning in his foot.
‘My mother is always telling me that English is the only language worth . . .’ She stopped. A tight gasp reached his ears.
He turned his head and found her staring, mouth open, at his foot. Her gaze rose to his face and for a long moment their eyes met and held. He looked away. When he lifted his foot off the sodden rags and placed it into the swirling flow of the river, she said nothing. Just watched in silence. He started to rub his hands over the wounds under the water, massaging the poisons out and the life back in. Clots of dried blood drifted on the surface and were instantly snapped up by hungry mouths from below. A steady trail of bright blood drew a darting shoal of tiny fish that flashed green against the yellow stones of the riverbed. The water was cool. His foot seemed to drink in the coolness.
He heard a noise and swung around. She was kneeling on the grass beside him, her face white under the fraying hat. In her hand lay the needle and thread. The presence of her so close made the air between them flutter like doves’ wings on his cheek, and his fingertips longed to touch her creamy European skin.
‘You’ll need these,’ she said and held them out to him.
He nodded. But as he reached for them, she swayed away from him and shook her head.
‘Would it help if I did it?’ she asked.
He nodded again. He saw her swallow. Her soft pale throat seemed to quiver in a brief spasm, then settle.
‘You need a doctor.’
‘A doctor costs dollars.’
She said nothing more, but threw off her hat, letting loose the wonderful fox spirit of her hair, the way he’d once loosed the fox from the snare. She leaned over his foot. Not touching. Just looking. He could hear her breathing, in and out, feel it brush the jagged edges of his damaged flesh like the kiss of the river god.
He emptied his mind of the hot pain. Instead he filled it with the sight of the smooth arch of her high forehead and the copper glow of one lock of her hair that curled on the white skin of her neck. Perfection. Not pain. He closed his eyes and she started to sew. How could he tell her he loved her courage?
‘That’s better,’ she said, and he heard the relief in her voice.
She had removed her underskirt, quickly and without embarrassment, cut it into strips with his knife, and bound his foot into a stiff white bundle that would no longer fit inside his shoe. Without asking, she cut the shoe’s rubber sides, then tied it over the bandage with two more strips of cloth. It looked clean and professional. The pain was still there but at last the blood had stopped.
‘Thank you.’ He gave her a small bow with his head.
‘You need sulphur powder or something. I’ve seen Mrs Yeoman use it to dry up sores. I could ask her to . . .’
‘No, it is not needed. I know someone who has herbs. Thank you again.’
She turned her face away and trailed her hands through the water, fingers splayed out. She watched their movement as if they belonged to someone else, as if she were surprised by what they had done today.
‘Don’t thank me,’ she said. ‘If we go around saving each other’s lives, then that makes us responsible for each other. Don’t you think?’
Chang was stunned. She had robbed his tongue of words. How could a barbarian know such things, such Chinese things? Know that this was the reason he had followed her, watched over her. Because he was responsible for her. How could this girl know that? What kind of mind did she possess that could see so clearly?
He felt the loss of her from his side when she rose to her feet, kicked off her sandals, and waded into the shallows. A golden-headed duck, startled from its slumber in the reeds, paddled off downstream as fast as if a stoat were on its tail, but she scarcely seemed to notice, her hands busy splashing water over the hem of her dress. It was a shapeless garment, washed too many times, and for the first time he saw the blood on it. His blood. Entwined in the fibres of her clothes. In the fibres of her. As she was entwined in the fibres of him.
She was silent. Preoccupied. He studied her as she stood in the creek, her skin rippling with silver stars reflected from the water, the sunlight on her hair making it alive and molten. Her full lips were slightly open as if she would say something, and he wondered what it might be. A heart-shaped face, finely arched brows, and those wide amber eyes, a tiger’s eyes. They pierced deep inside you and hunted out your heart. It was a face no Chinese would find alluring, the nose too long, the mouth too big, the chin too strong. Yet somehow it drew his gaze again and again, and satisfied his eyes in ways he didn’t understand but in ways that contented his heart. But he could see secrets in her face. Secrets made shadows, and her face was full of pale breathless shadows.
He lay back on the warm grass, resting on his elbows.
‘Lydia Ivanova,’ he said quietly. ‘What is it that is such trouble to you?’
She lifted her gaze to his and in that second when their eyes fixed on each other, he felt something tangible form between them. A thread. Silver and bright and woven by the gods. Shimmering between them, as elusive as a ripple in the river, yet as strong as one of the steel cables that held the new bridge over the Peiho.
He lifted a hand and stretched it out to her, as if he would draw her to him. ‘Tell me, Lydia, what lies so heavy on your heart?’
She stood up straight in the water, letting go of the edge of her dress so that it floated around her legs like a fisherman’s net. He saw a decision form in her eyes.
‘Chang An Lo,’ she said, ‘I need your help.’
A breeze swept in off the Peiho River. It carried with it the stench of rotting fish guts. It came from the hundre
ds of sampans that crowded around the flimsy jetties and pontoons that clogged the banks, but Chang was used to it. It was the stink of boiled cowhide from the tannery behind the godowns around the harbour.
He moved quickly. Shut his mind to the knives in his foot and slipped silently past the noisy, shouting, clattering world of the riverside, where tribes of beggars and boatmen made their homes. The sampans bobbed and jostled each other with their rattan shelters and swaying walkways, while cormorants perched, tethered and starved, on the prows of the fishermen’s boats. Chang knew not to linger. Not here. A blade between ribs, and a body to add to the filth thrown daily into the Peiho, was not unheard of for no more than a pair of shoes.
Out where the great Peiho flowed wider than forty fields, British and French gunboats rode at anchor, their white and red and blue flags fluttering a warning. At the sight of them Chang spat on the ground and trampled it into the dirt. He could see that half a dozen big steamers had docked in the harbour, and near-naked coolies bent double as they struggled up and down the gangplanks under loads that would break the back of an ox. He kept clear of the overseer who strutted with a heavy black stick in his hand and a curse on his tongue, but everywhere men shouted, bells rang, engines roared, camels screamed, and all the time in and out of the chaos wove the rickshaws, as numerous as the black flies that settled over everything.
Chang kept moving. Skirted the quayside. Ducked down an alleyway where a severed hand lay in the dust. On to the godowns. These were huge warehouses that were well guarded by more blue devils, but behind them a row of lean-to shacks had sprung up. Not shacks so much as pig houses, no higher than a man’s waist and built of rotting scraps of driftwood. They looked as if a moth’s wings could blow them away. He approached the third one. Its door was a flap of oilcloth. He pulled it aside.
‘Greetings to you, Tan Wah,’ he murmured softly.
‘May the river snakes seize your miserable tongue,’ came the sharp reply. ‘You have stolen away my soft maidens, skin as sweet as honey on my lips. Whoever you are, I curse you.’
The Russian Concubine Page 12