‘Leaping Goat Lane,’ she said aloud and climbed up on the low ledge of a stone trough in front of a water pump where the water had dripped into a frozen tear. At the top of her voice she shouted out, ‘Can anyone tell me which is Leaping Goat Lane?’
Several of the heads hurrying past turned to stare at her with interest, and she saw two thin men in bamboo hats swerve from their path and shoulder their way toward her. She swallowed. It was a risk, but time was running out for Chang and she was desperate to find him. Suddenly she was whisked off her feet. Something seized her, whirled her into the air, and shook her like a rag doll. Her eyes rattled in her head. She kicked out. Punched the side of a face. Bit some thing.
‘Lydia Ivanova. Nyet. No. Nyet.’
It was Liev Popkov. He shook her again and she wrapped her arms around him with relief.
They hurried down Leaping Goat Lane. The rain was falling harder. A mule train carrying great coils of rope trekked past them with much shouting and whip cracking. Liev Popkov kept one hand firmly round Lydia’s wrist.
He had been angry with her. For misunderstanding him. For thinking he would go into a bar for anything other than information. He told her off, shouted at her for leaving instead of waiting, and his anger pleased her. She knew she should be frightened of him but she wasn’t. No more than her mother had been in the face of his drunken onslaught. That thought jolted her. Even the men at the wedding party had backed off in alarm and talked of guns and police, but not Valentina. It made Lydia wonder for the first time whether her mother knew Liev Popkov better than she was admitting.
‘The godowns.’ Lydia pointed.
Ahead of them stood a group of buildings, large and lifeless, with corrugated roofs and no windows. These were the warehouses where imported and exported goods were stored until the tax inspectors had taken their cut. A few uniformed guards with guns on their hips patrolled in a desultory manner, more interested in keeping dry than watching out for thieves. The yards here were even worse than the streets. They stank of putrefaction. All around were bundles of sodden rags, at the base of walls or hunched tight under a sill or in a gutter.
Lydia knew that there were people under the pathetic scraps of cloth, but which ones were breathing and which ones were dead and rotting where they lay, only their gods knew. The sick fear that one could be Chang An Lo drove her to approach a huddle in a doorway, where she could just make out a dark thatch of wet hair and a high forehead that looked familiar. But when he lifted his face to her, it wasn’t Chang. This man’s eyes had no fire. No hope. His skin was covered in blackened boils, and foamy crimson blood was trickling from the side of his mouth.
Lydia remembered the two hundred dollars in her pocket. She reached in for it, but before her fingers had freed up a few notes Liev Popkov yanked her away.
‘Tchuma. The plague,’ he said in English with disgust. In Russian he added, ‘He’ll be dead before nightfall.’ He took the money from her and replaced it in his own pocket.
Plague.
Just the word sent shivers through her. She’d heard Alfred mention it. He said that it had started in the army and that when the warlords were defeated, the soldiers fled back to their villages, spreading the disease like wildfire. Famine in the scorched fields sent the peasants flocking into the towns for food and work but instead they coughed their lungs into a gutter. Died frozen in their rags. Lydia took off her coat and draped it over the trembling heap of bones.
‘Fool, glupaya dura,’ Liev swore.
But she knew he would not take back the coat, not now. It was plague ridden. Her fear for Chang burned in her chest and she hurried onward to the warehouses. Calfield had to be one of them. Had to be.
It was.
CALFIELD & CO., Engine Machinery. The sign was painted in black on the eighth godown they came across. Liev had removed his own overcoat and placed it on Lydia despite her objections, but underneath he wore an odd assortment of garments, including a thick leather tunic that shrugged off the rain. They searched. Every inch of ground. They paced around the Calfield warehouse and then out farther, circling other warehouses, other storerooms.
‘Nothing here,’ Liev muttered. He looked up at the slate sky and then at her wet face. She clamped her chattering teeth shut. ‘Home,’ he said.
Lydia shook her head. ‘Nyet. I search again.’
She went around to the back of the row of corrugated buildings once more and scanned the stretch of bare wasteland that lay behind them. Nothing grew there. Even the weeds had been torn up and eaten, but a hundred yards or so in the distance were the bare spikes of a bush that had somehow managed to grub a life for itself. A bank of mist had settled behind it. For no reason other than that there was nowhere else to search, Lydia headed in that direction.
The wasteland was a sea of mud with no roots to hold the soil together. She slipped and skidded at every step, stumbling to her knees, blinking the rain from her eyes, but she finally reached the stubby bush. When she raised her head from watching where she placed her feet, avoiding the trailing coat, she saw what lay behind it. A shallow gully. Five or six feet deep with a sluggish layer of rainwater covering the bottom. That’s what caused the mist. A few yards off to her right stood a row of ramshackle shelters, half collapsed by the rain.
‘Chang!’ she shouted and slithered down the muddy bank.
34
Lydia found him. Inside the third heap of driftwood and rags and newspapers that was meant to keep the rain off but failed miserably. She was terrified he was dead, he lay so still. Eyes closed. His skin as grey as the water that swilled over the earth beneath him. She crawled inside the hutch, too low to stand, and knelt beside him in the mud, her heart like a stone in her throat. He was wrapped in old newspaper that was so wet from the rain pouring through the roof and from the water rising underneath that it was disintegrating and freezing at the same time. His eyes were encrusted shut and his face was covered in sores. But not boils. Thank God. Not the plague.
She touched him. Like ice. A cocoon of ice. Her fingers tore fiercely at the paper, stripped it from his body. She gasped. His body. It was barely there. A few rags and a few bones. The sight of them wrenched a cry from her. Her eyes stung with tears. The stench was of rotting flesh and it was the smell of death.
No, no, not dead. Not dead. She wouldn’t let him be dead.
She swept Liev’s heavy coat from her shoulders and laid it on top of Chang’s inert form. ‘Don’t let go, my love,’ she called out to him but barely recognised the voice as her own. She leaned over him, brushed a hand across his cold forehead, placed her lips on his, and kept them there, willing the warmth of her body and the force of her life into him. His lips, cracked and scabbed, gave the slightest of trembles beneath hers. But it was enough. ‘Liev,’ she shouted, ‘Liev, come…’
There was no need to call. He was there. With an easy nudge of his hand he tore off what little remained of the hutch’s roof, bent down, and hoisted Chang onto his shoulder. Lydia quickly wrapped the coat around the still form and pulled it tight against the rain.
‘A rickshaw,’ she said. ‘We need a rickshaw.’
‘No rickshaw puller take me. I’m too heavy. Nor touch this sick body.’
‘Can you carry him as far as the British Quarter?’
His lips unsheathed a grin inside his black beard. ‘Can a tiger catch a fawn?’
The bolt to the back gate was locked. Liev just leaned against it and it sprang open with a loud crack as the nails left the wood. Lydia checked that the garden of her new home was empty. It was nearly dark and still raining. She was thankful for that. These smart streets were not ones where you could pass unnoticed if you were covered in mud and carrying a strange bundle, but the grey gloom of evening gave them shadows to hide in. A narrow alley ran behind the back gardens of the houses, where the rubbish was put out for collection, and it was to this that she had led Liev.