We arrived at Torneo and the border that night. The Tsarevitch was lying in his sleeper by then. He had done some reading but had turned in, knowing we would have another train to transfer to and that he would be woken when the time came.

After all that moving, any kind of stop feels sudden, and it brought him out of his room in a hurry, not properly awake and saying, ‘What’s happening, Uncle Secretary?’ – his voice full of concern. It made me wonder if the entire day had been a mask. All the talk, the games. That he had contrived a sense of ease as much as I had, and knew the world better than I had realised.

‘Nothing, my boy,’ I told him. ‘The border with Sweden. Nothing more.’

He stared out the window, at a locomotive being prepared on a siding. It had a full tender and no railcars attached. It was all black, with the number 293 on the front in white, above a strip painted red.

He sat with me, not fully awake, looking out at that locomotive. It was the only thing lit up. There was a light above it, shining down, lighting up the engine and the snow, and beyond that there was very little. One or two smaller lights in station buildings, perhaps.

The locomotive had a distinctly American look to it, unlike those I’d been on between Petrograd and Mogilev. I told him as much. I thought back to my plans for American rolling stock coming to Russia, but I kept that to myself.

From out of the darkness – the Tsarevitch saw it first – some boys ran to the tender. The others hoisted the smallest one on board and he started throwing down coal by the handful, tossing it into sacks they had brought. There was a sudden shrill whistle, loud enough it came through the glass, and the boys on the ground dropped their sacks and ran to get out of the light. The one on top was slow getting down as the soldiers appeared. They shouted at him. They were holding rifles, but most of them by the barrel. He held up a piece of coal, to show them he still had it, and he ran. They chased after him, most of them, but not one. He stood still and raised his rifle.

I heard myself shout, ‘No!’ at the glass as the shot came. One shot. That was all it took. The boy dropped dead to the snow and the coal tumbled out of his hand.

I turned to the Tsarevitch. I wanted to find the right thing to say.

He stared out at the boy. At the soldier. At the other soldiers who had stopped running and had no idea what to make of it. But mostly at the boy.

‘For a lump of coal,’ the Tsarevitch said.

There was a banging on the door before we could exchange any further words. Derevenko and Nagorny attended to it, with pistols drawn.