The telephone was taken from me without time for a goodbye, and the telegram was taken too, and pushed into the embers of the fire the guards had going in their small fireplace.

I then realised the purpose of the locomotive that was being prepared on the siding. It was to take the royal railcar and its passenger back to Petrograd.

Sweden was right there. I could have walked the boy into Sweden in five minutes, and kept him safe. I wondered if Hanbury might have an answer – a vain hope, almost certainly – and I asked to call him back.

The chief border guard appeared not to understand, so I pointed at the telephone and said, ‘Telefon, pozhaluysta. Hotel Astoria, Petrograd.’

He wasn’t having any of it. He told me no, in Russian and in English. There was no feeling to it. He wanted to be sure I got the message. He pointed past me, to where I had come from, and he said, ‘Poyezd, pozhaluysta.’ Train, please.

I could feel my pistol in my coat pocket up against my chest, but I had never once fired a shot from it. Hadn’t fired a shot from any gun in years. And here I was, with guards and a platoon of soldiers and bodyguards between me and the boy and any crazed notion that I might somehow magic him away.

I knew then that my mission was over, that Russia would fall, that there would not be a regime with which the United States might make a treaty, though I was not aware that it would take two revolutions and a further ten months for the new regime to seize power.

The Emperor has been criticised, but little of that criticism has come from people who knew him. He was an autocrat by birth, and hindsight would say, ‘If only he had developed his Duma faster, given it more powers, ensured that all stayed fed and warm that awful winter when sentiment truly turned. If only the family had excised the monk from their lives, or never let him into it . . .’

The system was not the best system, there is no denying that. But he was a fine man, and Hanbury is right to defend him. But, if there is one regret we share, Hanbury and I, it is that we did not save the boy.

We spoke of it this morning, in a moment away from the bridal party. They must see the best of us, Hanbury’s younger son – the groom – and the young fellow’s bride-to-be, the Princess Zenaida, daughter of our friend Prince Mikhail and great-granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant. At the wedding, the princess is to wear jewels she had sewn into her clothing when they made their escape from Petrograd. There are good people who are absent, but who must be remembered, and those jewels are part of that story.