No. Not for any of those did the eyes follow her. It was because there was an irrepressible air about her, an energy that they all envied, all craved. There was something unbroken, untamed in the way she swung her head or darted her eyes. They envied her that. However much he clothed her in drooping coats and stuck ugly hats on her head, he couldn’t hide it. He lit himself another cheroot and saw Lydia turn her head, give him a soft, almost shy smile.

He knew why he’d come. He’d come for her.


‘We’re close now.’

Alexei’s words caught Lydia by surprise. They were about to climb on to the train. Just when it seemed they’d be stranded for yet another interminable day, the train had announced itself with a belch of smoke. The crush of passengers surged around them on the platform but the big Cossack grinned, holding them back from the steps to make space for Lydia. Alexei offered a hand to help her up the steps, and that was when he said, ‘We’re close now.’

‘It’s taken us long enough.’ She felt a rush of affection as she gripped his hand.

‘It’s just a matter of narrowing the distance, day by day.’

‘I know, and we’re getting better at it, Alexei. We’re close now and we’ll stay that way.’

He hesitated, but he returned the pressure of her fingers. Only then did it occur to Lydia that she might have misunderstood. Alexei might not have been talking about them – about her and himself. He could have been referring to the fact that they were getting closer to the camp. Suddenly she felt mortified at her blunder.

‘Lydia.’ Alexei leapt up on the step behind her and touched her shoulder. ‘I’m glad I came.’

She turned and looked at him. ‘I’m glad you did, too,’ she said.


Lydia tucked the rug tightly around her knees and sank deeper into her seat between Alexei and Popkov. The train compartment was full but most of her fellow travellers were dozing. One old man over by the door was snuffling into his moustache.

‘What part of Russia do you hail from, girl?’

It was the passenger in the seat opposite who had spoken, the woman who had been snoring in the next room at the hotel. She was plump and middle-aged, with a flowered scarf around her head, making her cheeks puff out like a hamster’s.

Lydia felt pleased by the question. It made all the aching hours of hard work worth the effort. For months now she’d spoken nothing but Russian and was even finding herself thinking in Russian now. The words seemed to fit inside her mouth as if finally they belonged there. From the moment they left China, Alexei and Popkov adamantly refused to speak anything but Russian to her.

She’d groaned and moaned and whined, but Alexei wouldn’t budge. It was fine for him. He’d lived in St Petersburg until he was twelve years old and had the advantage that, even in China after the Bolshevik Revolution, his mother, Countess Serova, had insisted on speaking her native tongue within the home. So no problems for him. The words flowed from him like black Russian oil, and even though he spoke English as elegantly as any English county squire, he refused to let even one word of it pass his lips.

Lydia had cursed him. In English. In Russian. Even in Chinese.

‘You bastard, Alexei, you’re enjoying this. Help me out here.’

‘Nyet.’

‘Damn you.’

He’d smiled that infuriating smile of his and watched her make a mess of it again and again. It had been a lonely start for her, isolated by her lack of words, but now, though she hated to admit it, she realised he’d been right. She’d learned fast and now she enjoyed using the language her Russian mother had refused to teach her.

‘Russian?’ Valentina would say in their Chinese attic with a scowl on her beautiful fine-boned face, her dark eyes flashing with contempt. ‘What good is Russian now? Russia is finished. Look how those murdering Bolsheviks destroy my poor country and strip her naked. I tell you, malishka, forget Russia. English is the language of the future.’

Then she’d toss her long silky hair as if tossing all Russian words out of her head.

But now in a cold and smelly train rattling its way across the great flat plain of northern Russia towards Felanka, Lydia was cramming those words into her own head and listening to the woman opposite her asking, ‘What part of Russia do you hail from?’

‘I come from Smolensk,’ she lied and saw the woman nod, satisfied.

‘From Smolensk,’ she said again, and liked the sound of it.

4

China, 1930


The cave was cold. Cold enough to freeze the breath of the gods, yet too shallow to risk a fire. Chang An Lo had hunkered down in the entrance, still as one of the brittle grey rocks that littered the naked mountainside all around him. No movement. Nothing. Grey against the unrelenting grey of the winter sky. But outside the cave a thin dusty crust of snow swirled off the frozen scree and formed stinging tumbles of ice in the air that clung to his eyelashes, and nicked the skin of his lips till they bled. He didn’t notice. Behind him water trickled down the lichen-draped walls, a whispery treacherous sound that seeped into his mind sharper than the cold.

Hold the mind firm.

Mao Tse Tung’s words. The powerful new leader who had wrenched control of the Chinese Communist Party for himself.

Chang blinked his eyes, freeing them from ice, and felt a rogue twist of anger in his guts. Focus. He fought to still his mind, to focus on what was to come. Let the gutter-licking grey dogs of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army learn what he had in store for them, discover what was waiting on the rail track in the valley below. Like an alligator waits in the great Yangtze River. Unseen. Unheard. Until its teeth tear you apart.

Chang moved, no more than the slightest flick of his gloved hand, but it was enough to draw a slender figure from the back of the hollow that the wind and rain had carved out of the rock. The figure, like Chang, wore a heavy cap and padded coat that robbed it of any shape, so only the soft voice in his ear indicated that his companion was female. She crouched beside him, her movements as fluid as water.

‘Are they coming?’ she whispered.

‘The snowdrifts across the valleys will have delayed the train. But yes, it’s coming.’

‘Can we be certain?’

‘Hold your mind firm,’ Chang echoed his leader’s words.

His sharp black eyes scanned the mountainous landscape around him. China was an unforgiving land, especially harsh on those who had to scrape a living up here from its bleak, treeless terrain, where the relentless winds from Siberia raked the surface free of soil like fingernails scraping dirt off the skin. Yet something about this place satisfied his soul, something hard and demanding; the mountains a symbol of stillness and balance.

Not like the soft humid breezes that he had grown used to in recent months down south in the provinces of Hunan and Jiangxi. That was where the Communist heartland lay. There in Mao Tse Tung’s own hideout near Nanchang, Chang had smelled a sticky sweetness in the air that turned his stomach. It was in the paddy fields. On the terraces. In the Communist training camps. That smell of corruption. Of a man crazed by power.

Chang had spoken to no one about his awareness of it, told none of his brother Communists of his sense that something at the heart of things wasn’t quite as it should be. They were all, himself included, willing to fight Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling Nationalists and die for what they believed in, yet… Chang inhaled sharply. His friend, Li Ta-chao, had been dedicated to the cause and had died with his sixty comrades in the heart of Peking itself. Chang spat his disgust on to the barren rock. His friend had been betrayed. Executed by slow strangulation. There was nothing definite Chang could point to and say, This is where the corruption lies. Just an uneasy rustle in his soul. A cold wind that cut deep and made him wary.

It was certainly nothing he could mention to Kuan. He turned to her now and studied her intense young face with its straight brows and high, broad cheekbones. It wasn’t what any man would call a pretty face but it possessed a strength and determination that Chang cared for. And when she smiled – which was rare – it was as if some dark demon vanished from her spirit and let the light inside her glow bright as the morning sun.

‘Kuan,’ he murmured, ‘do you ever think about the lives we take when we commit ourselves to an action like this? About the parents bereaved? About the wives and children whose hearts will break when the knock comes to their door with the news?’

Her body shivered close beside his shoulder and she turned her head quickly to face him, the soft pads of her cheeks red with cold. But he could sense the shiver was not one of horror, could see it in her eyes, hear it in the shallow rhythm of her breathing. It was a shiver of excitement.

‘No, my friend, I don’t,’ she said. ‘You, Chang An Lo, are the one who planned this operation, who guided us here. We followed you, so surely you’re not…’ Her voice trailed away, unwilling to give life to the words.

‘No, I’m not altering my plan.’

‘Good. The train is coming, you say.’

‘Yes. Soon. And Chiang Kai-shek’s dung eaters deserve to die. They massacre our brothers with no hesitation.’

She nodded, a vehement jerk of her head, her breath coiling in the grey air.

‘We are at war,’ Chang said, his eyes on the gun at his belt. ‘People die.’

‘Yes, a war we will win so that Communism can bring justice and equality to the people of China.’ Up on the godforsaken icy mountain ledge, Kuan smiled at Chang and he felt the heat of it warm just the outer edge of the cold void that lay black and empty in the cavern of his chest.