The Tsarevitch told me that the author of the journal was a Talbot, and pointed out that I had Talbot as a first name. He asked if the name was a common one, and if he should expect to hear it in London. It was the first I knew of his awareness of my given name, but he was an observant boy, with an enquiring mind. I should not have been surprised.

His packer trunks were half-filled with books, most from Gibbes but also others. His French tutor had him reading Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours by Jules Verne. I had just enough French in me to know which book it was, and I said to him, ‘You know, Americans have beaten that record several times.’

He puffed up in his seat and said to me, ‘When I am Emperor, Uncle Secretary, Russians will beat it, and beat the Americans too.’

In this way, the first day passed as if it were a conversation in a British drawing room, though I did from time to time make rounds of our railcar to ensure all was safe and well, and I slept poorly that night, with my pistol beside me. I have slept well in worse sleeping compartments of railcars, almost always, but not on this night when I had the future of Russia to watch over.

The next day was New Year’s Eve in the New Style, but not even Christmas in the Old. We made a stop early in the day to take on coal. I have no idea of the name of the town, but it was not a happy place. The Tsarevitch was still in his bed then. It was not fully light out but, as the train stood there, people in rags came up to it out of the grey, calling out, holding up their scrawny babies. The thickness of the glass stopped me hearing their voices. I assume they were pleading for food. Police came with long sticks and took a swing at one of them and they all fell back, but kept up their pleading at a distance.

The town was a poor sort of place, wooden buildings with little care given to them. Perhaps it was not at its best in the snow, its trees all bare. But it was Russia. It was the truth of it. Beyond it rose and fell the low hills and plains of an empire full of misery and discontent, as far as China, as far as a strait with United States territory on the other side of it in the form of Alaska. And here was I, minding a child asleep in his bed. The child who was the answer, the rallying point, the better Russia, somehow. A child who, like any child, deserved safety and the full ripening of years.

The cook was making breakfast and perhaps it was the smell that woke the boy, or the tug of the locomotive as we set about moving again.