The question she never stopped asking herself was, Who threw that snowball in the dark? Her mother? Her father? Or her mother’s friend, Colonel Slava, whom Genia with a child’s crush had always thought handsome until he ransacked Balnasharki in the autumn of 1917.

That was her last memory of the home. She heard the Colonel’s arrival from the lake as her father rowed over the water, disturbing the midges. Her father laid down an oar. They listened to the canter of hooves in the trees.

“I’ll talk to him, Nikolai,” said her mother. “Just get Genia away.”

No lamp-light swayed on the water. On the far side the boat hit a sandbank. Her father stood unsteadily. Cursing, he tried to push them free. He thought he knew the shallows, every inch. He’d left his cigars behind. The boat didn’t shift. “It’s your trunk weighing us down,” he whispered. He plopped off his boots and pushed the boat to the shore. There was a scuffle and the reeds parted on a nervous face. His ADC would take Genia to the dacha in Kirov.

“Goodbye, my child.” He kissed the top of her clean head. “I must go back to your mother.” Genia last saw her father pulling out of the reeds, rowing back to the house, ominously silent, until the darkness and the midges ate him and all she heard was the squeak of metal, a muffled clatter as an oar slipped its rowlock and the slap of his hand on his cheek.

From Kirov she journeyed north to Archangel, where she was left in the care of a pomor trader. Her father had given her a leather envelope of jewels, some Kerensky notes and a letter to this man, the uncle of a colleague in the guard. His ships carried flour and timber and rye to Norway, returning with a cargo of dried cod. In December his cargo included the twelve-year-old Evgenia Nikolaevna. She travelled in the guise of an under-maid. She was returning to the household of his daughter in Tromso. The captain explained this in a hybrid dialect of Russian and Norsk.

Deep into the second night, the Captain shook her awake. He held a bowl of buckwheat porridge. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ve passed Posvik. We’re in Norwegian water.” She could tell by his face they were safe.

They dropped anchor in Tromso, the world’s most northerly city. They arrived in the Morketiden, the Murky Time. It was midday and snow ripped from a grey sack of sky. It fell on her cheeks like pieces of wet bread. There was no sun. The sun, which had sunk into the sea beyond Bensfordtind mountain, would remain underwater until January.

Over Russia strange lights rippled the dark where the sky was clear. She thought it was gunfire, but the captain laughed. He hauled her trunk on deck. They were rowed to the quayside and a cart carried them to a house in Karlpedersengate.

Evgenia Nikolaevna paid for her passage and lodging from the envelope of jewels. She heard nothing from Balnasharki. On each trip the pomor trader produced another fragment of news, none of it concerning the situation in Kiev. Then in June he received information from his nephew in the White Guard. The regiment had scattered. Many had been executed. These included Genia’s father. His body and also the body of his beautiful wife had been found deteriorating in the lake.