Free The Concubine's Secret by Kate Furnivall

Antonina had turned her back on Lydia, her long fur coat swaying as if the skins were still alive.
    ‘ Nyet, Lydia.’ She started to walk away, calling over her shoulder, ‘My answer is no.’
    The soldier closed the door and the train began to move. Quickly Lydia opened the window and leaned out. ‘I’ll be in the hostel in Felanka,’ she shouted after the retreating woman. ‘You can leave a message for me there.’
    Slowly the figures on the platform grew smaller. Lydia continued to stare at where they had been, long after the rain swallowed them.

7
    ‘Yob tvoyu mat!’ Liev Popkov swore suddenly and pushed his huge fist towards the window. ‘Look at that. It’s the stinking hell-hole.’
    Alexei saw Lydia elbow him hard in the ribs to silence him, but it was too late. Every head in the carriage turned to stare at what he’d indicated and a young woman with a baby asleep in her arms started to weep silently. It was the camp. Trovitsk labour camp. It couldn’t be anything else, though from this distance it looked harmless enough, more like four dog kennels rising above the flat winter horizon. Those must be the tips of the watchtowers, but the rest of the camp was lost in a faint blur, secretive and secluded, too far away to make out anything of the communal huts or barbed wire fences.
    ‘God help the bastards,’ Alexei muttered.
    The big woman opposite grimaced. ‘He hasn’t done much of a job of it so far.’
    Lydia looked round at them both and frowned. Her tawny eyes were huge. A straggle of hair had crept out from under her hat and lay like a lick of flame on the collar of her coat. ‘The Soviet State is looking after those people,’ she said in a curt voice. ‘It does what is best. For all of us.’
    Oh Lydia. But Alexei made a show of nodding agreement. ‘ Da , we must never forget what we owe the State.’
    ‘As if we could,’ the big woman chuckled, and the chuckle grew until it was a loose rollicking laugh that shook her abundant bosom and sounded too loud in the tight confines of the carriage. Alexei eyed her with increasing caution.
    At the other end of the carriage a man with a pipe and a bushy Stalin moustache banged his hand flat on his knee. ‘Those prisoners are here for good reason. Don’t let’s forget that, comrade. ’
    Alexei let his eyes stray again to the window and a small shock ran through him. The landscape was monotonously flat, a naked terrain that betrayed the scars and stumps where a forest had once stood, but way off to one side, along the edge of a stand of pine trees which had somehow escaped the axe, eight men were bent double, hauling a wagon. It was stacked high with bare tree trunks and the men were yoked to it by chains. Beyond them, so small and colourless they were scarcely visible against the icy wasteland, other figures scuttled like ants across the Work Zone.
    ‘Yes,’ Alexei murmured, not taking his eyes off them. ‘That’s why they’re here. It’s the raw materials we need.’
    ‘For industry?’ the woman asked.
    He nodded. ‘For Stalin’s great Five Year Plan.’
    ‘So what is it the prisoners do all the way up here?’
    Still he watched them. Saw a man fall. ‘Mining. This region is rich in ore and coal.’
    An uncomfortable silence descended, while the passengers pictured the prisoners, black-faced somewhere deep under the train’s wheels, swinging picks at a brutal coal seam, lungs filling up with heavy choking dust.
    ‘And timber,’ Alexei added softly.
    Dear God, let Jens Friis be good with a saw.
     
    ‘This place is too tidy for us,’ Liev Popkov growled under his breath. ‘Too clean.’
    For once the ox brain was right. The town of Felanka was not what Alexei had been expecting and not what he wanted. They were walking down the main street, Gorky Ulitsa, with Lydia tucked safely between them, taking a careful look at their surroundings. Where were the usual rows of ugly concrete apartment blocks? Most of the towns up here in the