‘Ah, but General Gurko is not at Stavka at present,’ he said to me. ‘He left some time ago for a meeting with the Emperor. I shall return to the same building for afternoon lessons the moment I have eaten. Come with me and you can meet them both at once.’ It was not my intention to begin my stay by meeting the Emperor, and this was a decidedly irregular way to go about it, but there was no possibility of refusing the boy’s offer, and no reason to.

McCully, seeing his job as escort was done and telling me I appeared to have fallen in with the right crowd, made his farewells and hailed a carriage to convey him to the station, where he would take the next train to Petrograd. As the Tsarevitch ate his black bread and I watched Captain McCully step up into the carriage, I had the clearest sense that my mission was mine and mine alone, and that I was now alone to do it, for better or worse. In America, there were no more than a handful of people who knew what I was undertaking, and outside America there was only me – the Stavka visitor, the one-time senator, a friend with no stated intentions – as the world made its way to calamity or not, and Russia did the same. I knew what our hopes for Russia and my mission were. I had no sense of how they might be achieved.

But I should tell you about my first meeting with the Emperor. I had spoken with Ambassador Francis of his first encounter, and mine was to be nothing like it. I was escorted there by the Tsarevitch, his tutor and his silent, vigilant sailor, the boy chatting amiably as though he and I spoke regularly.

Ambassador Francis had been taken by a private railcar from Petrograd to the imperial station, where he was met by the master of ceremonies and his retinue, all in glorious uniforms, who then conveyed the ambassador and his staff to the palace in a procession of carriages, each finished in gilt and drawn by six horses. He met the Emperor first and then the Empress, and found them both charming. He told me she had an American handshake and was such a conversationalist that, when he returned to Petrograd and was questioned by his staff there on what she had been wearing, he could not recall a single detail of it.

How different was your first meeting with the Emperor?

Well, this was in the Governor’s Palace, as it was called, though a governor is very different from an emperor. The building was on the main square, along with the town hall and other civic buildings. It was a long two-storey affair of classical proportions. From there, a road led down to the river, and a bridge.