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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