It was my mission then. Mine alone to execute. Hanbury and Prince Mikhail’s plan, perhaps the plan of others too, but my mission. I had custody of a child on a false promise, but I had to set this falsehood aside and trust that it would hold as long as it needed to. Safe passage of the boy to London was my only priority. We had a week’s journey ahead. We would cross the border into Sweden the next night. That was the plan, anyway.

What did you and the Tsarevitch do during that time?

Once I could set aside my fears that our falsehood would be unmasked, there was a deceptive pleasure to much of that first day. I was no longer caught up in guarded conversations about America and the war, no longer trying to read the tides of Russian politics, nor talk about cables and railroads while not properly talking about cables and railroads. I had had a month in the shadows in Mogilev. And it was a place full of shadows.

There was a war on, but not in this railcar. Same applied to political unrest. I got to be the best great-uncle I could be, with a charming great-nephew for company. Perhaps I remember him too kindly. I wonder if you are thinking that, Mister Purbrick? Perhaps I do, but I’m sure you agree it is better to err on the side of kindness when talking about a child who was brought great unkindness, and is in no position to speak for himself.

As we pulled out of the city he pressed his face to the glass to see it all, then recoiled in a hurry, telling me a jolt when doing the same a year before had hit his face into the glass and caused a nosebleed that took an hour to stop. All that caution in his life, and he dreamed of a life less cautious, dreamed I was taking him to that, to the cure. To a life in which he might press his face against a window without giving it a thought, like any other child.

In that moment, I could not adequately console myself with the thought that I might be saving him from another danger instead, so I asked him about the journal he had taken from one of his trunks to read. It was from the time of the Patriotic War of 1812, he told me, part of his studies set by Mister Gibbes but, with no need to complete the task right away, we got to talking about it instead. We discussed all kinds of things around the subject of the wars of those times. He asked if I thought cavalry still had a role in war, saying his father did, but the Belgian general, de Ryckel, thought it did not. He asked my views on Napoleon, and I told him my reading suggested to me that Napoleon was a great attacking general, despite his two most notable defeats. In Russia, he got his timing wrong, pushing forward in winter, and at Waterloo, he came up against someone with less attack in him but the best defensive skills a general might have, that being the Duke of Wellington.