Straight away I wondered if I might have caused some offence, attributing skill to Wellington and the retreat from Russia to the season. I should have been more cognisant of the boy’s genealogy, and that he would likely prefer to believe that an ancestor of his had seen Napoleon off.

I tried to take the conversation down another track by saying, ‘Of course, the Waterloo victory was ultimately the work of one unheralded Dutch major, an ADC to Prince William, who provisioned the army and moved it in time to Quatre Bras to hold the crossroads, giving Wellington an extra day to prepare at Waterloo. Or perhaps that’s merely how the story’s told in my family, since the major was my great-grandfather on my mother’s side.’

He smiled at that and told me the Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna, sister of his great-great-grandfather, the first Emperor Nicholas, had married that same Dutch prince at the Winter Palace in Petrograd the following year. ‘So,’ he said, ‘our families are connected. We shared a common enemy, and a common friend.’

After a time, we fell to reading. The land we were passing was covered lightly with snow, and few people were about. One time I saw some boys hauling a sled with fallen branches on it. Fuel for a fire, I assumed.

The Tsarevitch asked me the meaning of a word from his war journal, two words. One was entirely new to me. I told him that, when I come upon an unfamiliar word, I try to use the context to work it out. He read the sentence to me. It went something like, ‘With only two wheels and its passengers facing out, the carriage looked like nothing so much as a jaunting car, with a soldier for a jarvey.’

He turned the journal around so I could see it. It was handwritten, an original journal, not the work of a printer.

I told him I had heard or perhaps read the expression ‘jaunting car’, though it was not an American one, and that I had always assumed it to be some kind of carriage, perhaps not a large one. ‘Jarvey’ was entirely unfamiliar, though, from the sentence, I wondered if the jarvey might be the driver of the car. This seemed to satisfy him.

I asked where the journal was from, and he told me it was from Sydney Ivanovich – Mister Gibbes – who had him reading journals of participants in the Napoleonic Wars in the original Russian, French, English and German. He had recently read one of an English officer’s travels in France during the Peace of Amiens in 1802, and now he was studying an Irishman’s account of the Siege of Vienna in 1809. Gibbes had obtained it from a Cambridge fellow who was a collector of items from those wars, during which time the fellow’s grandfather had been the British prime minister. The journals were to be donated to the university, but the donor was more than willing for them to be used to teach the future Russian Emperor first.