Hanbury looked bleak, is all I can say. There was bad news all over his face before he spoke it. The Empress had taken the entirety of that day’s consignment of Crimean hothouse flowers and arranged them in his room, and the Tsarevitch had been sent by his father to give some comfort.

To watch the boy there and the kindness of it and the care he was taking with his old friend, this British general, I had a strong and unexpected wish surge within me. A wish that I could make him well, give him the childhood and health he deserved, as well as the empire that should one day be his. He had bad blood but a good heart, and I – a proud adherent to the American system – could imagine a great Russia in his reign.

The boy had what the Russians call a ‘golden heart’. He cared for people, felt their every pain and endeavoured to do his best for them. He had no need to do that. I have known sons of doctors and sons of congressmen behave as though they owned the world, and here was the boy in line to own much of it not behaving like them in the slightest. He was born to rule but his nature was to care instead, which I might say is a fine attribute in those in positions of power.

Would you like to pause? Or perhaps take some water?

No, no . . . Perhaps water.

Let me return to Hanbury. He had friends around him, but was altogether too conscious of those who were not there – his lost son, his wounded son and his grieving wife, Annie. It was she who had kept his spirits up on that visit home in September, she who sent him back determined to do his duty, hold the Russians to the Allied cause and bring to an early and satisfactory end the war that was to take one son and wound another.

My thoughts turned to my own Margaret back in Maine – to the lives she and I had paused for this escapade of mine, to our children both lost and living, and to their children too, babies still, not yet delivered to any army or put at any risk, save the risks that life serves us all. The distance between Maine and Mogilev has never been so great as it was on that day.

I knew Margaret would ‘hold the fort’ as she had done while I was in the Senate, keeping a warm hearth, a good house and a contented family. It is a wonderful thing to have the skills to do that, while some others are off attending to the business of nations, telling themselves all the time how important that particular business is.