Kate Furnivall - The Jewel of St. Petersburg

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Table of Contents

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF KATE FURNIVALL

The Girl from Junchow

An engrossing adventure that sweeps readers in lush waves of drama and romance.

Library Journal

Furnivall deftly evokes the details of a bygone era.

Publishers Weekly

The Red Scarf

This romantic confection can make a reader shiver with dread for the horrors visited on the two heroines imprisoned in a labor camp and quiver with anticipation for their happy endings. Furnivall shows she has the narrative skills to deliver a sweeping historical epic.

Library Journal

Furnivall again pinpoints a little-known historical setting and brings it vividly to life through the emotions and insights of her characters. Beautifully detailed descriptions of the land and the compelling characters who move through a surprisingly upbeat plot make this one of the years best reads.

Booklist

The Russian Concubine

I read it in one sitting! Not only a gripping love story, but a novel that captures the sights, smells, hopes, and desires of Russia at the dawn of the twentieth century, and pre-Revolutionary China, so skillfully that readers will feel they are there.

Kate Mosse

The kaleidoscopic intensity of British writer Kate Furnivalls debut novel, The Russian Concubine, compellingly transports us back to 1928 and across the globe to the city of Junchow in northern China... Lydia is an endearing character, a young woman with pluck and determination... With artistry, Furnivall weaves a main plot that hinges on Lydias love affair with Chang An Lo, a Chinese youth who is a dedicated Communist at a time when Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalists are gaining ground... Furnivalls novel is an admirable work of historical fiction.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Furnivall vividly evokes Lydias character and personal struggles against a backdrop of depravity and corruption.

Publishers Weekly

The wonderfully drawn and all-too-human characters struggle to survive in a world of danger and bewildering change... caught between cultures, ideologiesand the growing realization that only the frail reed of love is strong enough to withstand the destroying winds of time.

Diana Gabaldon

This stunning debut brings the atmosphere of 1920s China vividly to life.... Furnivall draws an excellent portrait of this distant time and place.

Historical Novels Review

Also by the author

THE RUSSIAN CONCUBINE
THE RED SCARF
THE GIRL FROM JUNCHOW

To Carole and Wendy
with love

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Jackie Cantor for her patience and humor while bringing this book through its birth pangs, and to all her team at Berkley, especially Pam Barricklow, a true miracle worker. Many thanks also to Amy Schneider for her impressive skill in polishing the manuscript.

Brilliant thanks to my agent, Teresa Chris, for her constant guidance, as perceptive as ever, and to Patty Moobrugger for her support.

My gratitude also to Elena Shifrina for her enthusiastic assistance with research and the Russian language, and to Susan Clark for her musical advice. I am indebted to Marian Churchward for transforming my scrawl into a readable manuscript and for sharing my chocolate biscuits.

Huge thanks to my husband, Norman, for his encouragement and understanding, and especially for his cool ideas.

One

TESOVO, RUSSIA JUNE 1910

VALENTINA IVANOVA DID NOT INTEND TO DIE. NOT HERE. Not now. Not like this. With dirty feet and tangled hair and her life barely started. She looked down at her fingers in the fuzzy green gloom of the forest and was surprised to see them so steady. Inside she was shaking.

She always paid attention to fingers rather than faces because they told so much more. People remembered to guard their faces. They forgot their hands. Her own were small, though strong and supple from all the hours of piano playing, but what use was that now? For the first time she understood what real danger does to the human mind, as flat white fear froze the coils of her brain.

She could run. Or she could hide. Or she could stay where she was, molded to the trunk of a silver birch, and let them find her.

Dark figures were flitting silently from tree to tree, swallowed by the sullen vastness of the forest around her. She couldnt see them now, couldnt hear them, yet she knew they were there. They seemed to vanish like beetles into the bark, invisible and untraceable, but each time she flicked her head suddenly to one side or the other, she caught their movement at the corner of her eye. A trail of air, thin and secretive. A shift of light. A break in the twilight of the forest floor.

Who were these people? They carried rifles, but they didnt look like hunters. What hunters wore black hoods? What hunters had face masks with narrow slits for eyes and a jagged hole for a mouth?

She shivered. She wasnt willing to die.

Her feet were bare. Shed kicked off her shoes after the long gallop up the slope through the fields. The sky was still dark when shed crept out of bed. Shed ignored the hairpins and the buckles, the gloves and the hat, all the paraphernalia that her mother insisted a young lady must wear at all times outdoors. At seventeen, she was old enough now to make her own choices. So shed pulled a light sleeveless dress over her head, sneaked out of the house, saddled up Dasha and come up here to her favorite spot on her fathers country estate. Shed plunged into the dark somber fringe of the forest from where she loved to watch the dawn rise over Tesovo.

Her bare toes relished the black earth, moist as treacle. The wind had whipped her long dark hair in a fan across her cheeks and twined it around her neck. There was a freedom up here that loosened something inside her, something that had been wound too tight. It was always the same when the family left St. Petersburg and arrived in Tesovo for the drowsy months of summer and the long white nights when the sun scarcely bothered to drop below the horizon.

That was until she saw the rifles.

Men in hoods. All in black and moving with stealth through the shadowy world of the forest. Sweat pooled in the hollow of her back as she dodged behind a tree. She heard a murmur of blurred voices, nothing more, and for a while she waited, willing them to leave. But only when the crimson dawn drew a line like a trail of blood between the trees did the men suddenly spread out, vanishing completely, and Valentina felt her heart thump in panic.

A whisper? Was that a whisper behind her?

She spun around. Peered into the shadows but could see no one.

A moment later a shape flicked. Dark and quick, off to one side. Another directly ahead. They were circling her. How many? She sank down into the dense mist that rose from the ground and, crouching low, she started to run through the thick undergrowth. Thin gray ropes of mist coiled around her ankles and fronds reached for her face, but she didnt stop until she almost crashed into a pair of legs crossing an animal trail in front of her. She froze. In her leafy cavern under the ferns on the forest floor she didnt breathe. The legs paused, her terrified gaze fixed on a cloth patch that was badly sewn on the knee of the trousers, but then they moved on. She jinked to her left and scuttled farther. If she could find the edge of the forest where her horse was tethered, she could...

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