The barn was called by some older folk ‘Noah’s Ark’. I assumed it was because it was large and wooden and protected our animals in winter, but an old neighbour once told me it was after Noah, the carpenter who built it. I am sure the name was also in my father’s story, but it might be my own memory that has placed it there, working to manufacture an answer when it was unable to find any. I put it to him – the neighbour’s claim about Noah – but he told me some stories were just stories, and I shouldn’t go believing every little thing I heard.

It’s impossible to know the truth of it all. The traveller himself was of no assistance there. When he first took the music out to play it, he apparently told my grandfather he knew Beethoven. Then, with the lead figure in his hand, he told him he knew Napoleon. Then he said he had spoken to them both together, and my grandfather knew him at once for the storyteller he was. ‘What’s next out of that trunk of yours?’ he said to him. ‘George Washington’s teeth?’ That’s what he told me years later.

And what did the young Tsarevitch think of this story?

He tolerated it. Much like you, I suspect. He got a laugh out of the ending. George Washington’s teeth. Soon after, he took his watch out to show me, since my story had had a watch in it. His was gold too, naturally, but almost new. It had the Romanov crest etched into its hunter case, with gemstones as highlights. Those people he had not seen at dawn could have been fed for years by the sale of it, and I wondered if I should have woken him then after all. It was just a watch to him. He was only showing me to pass the time. Everything was to pass the time, and to stop feeling our worst fears.

When I returned from another walk around our railcar, he had a deck of playing cards out. English cards. He told me Russian decks had a different number of cards. He asked if I would like to play whist, but I told him I was unfamiliar with the game, having not seen it played until I saw him with Hanbury. It turned out he had already begun to teach his bodyguards and together we made up a foursome, as strange a foursome as has ever played whist, I imagine – two Russian sailors and a retired United States senator, all three with guns in their coats, being led through the game in two languages by a boy born to rule half the world but now unwittingly escaping it on a railroad to Bergen.

This game of whist occupied much of the afternoon, into twilight at least. Later, the Tsarevitch made the cards a parting gift, and told me I should teach the game to more Americans. I still have them, though I had to buy myself a copy of Cavendish on Whist, to be sure I was teaching it correctly.