But Pyotr didn’t move; he was staring at the door. I felt a blast of cold air in my back, snow spiralled into the warmth on the freezing wind, a shower of icy flakes landed on my neck and when I turned there he was, steam rising like smoke from his tall fur hat and his long frozen coat: a huge black-haired man, dark and wild like a Cossack, with a beard and a broken nose and narrow glaring eyes and a thin furious mouth – the meanest, most murderously bad-tempered looking person I had ever seen in my life. In one gloved hand he carried a large bone-handled knife with a curved blade that dangled almost to the floor; in the other – a piece of brown paper crumpled into a twisted cone, like a small flowerless bouquet, or the losing end of a Christmas cracker. He asked for vodka.

Pyotr and I began to scurry about, Pyotr going out to the shed for wood to build up the dying fire and back out again to see to the man’s horse. I heated up what I had left of the stew and poured vodka into a brown jug and worried about how I was going to tell the terrifying Cossack that I was full for the night, that I had no beds left. Perhaps I could go up and ask the young lawyer if he wouldn’t mind squeezing into the dormitory if I put a mattress on the floor and gave him back his money in the morning?

Perhaps —

But I got no further with sorting out the bed problem, because just then Pyotr came back into the kitchen and I knew at once that he had some news to tell me. He was a close, silent sort of man, Pyotr, someone who, though he swore quite a lot, actively seemed to dislike having to speak. On this occasion however I could see that there was something urgent and unavoidable he felt obliged to communicate.

He stood for a while, stamping his boots on the mat to get rid of the snow and untying the laces of his hat from around his chin so that the furry ear flaps hung loose on either side of his broad head.

‘What is it, Pyotr?’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’

He nodded towards the other room, where the Cossack was, and over to the little window near the front door.

‘A woman.’

‘A woman?’

Pyotr nodded. ‘Outside. On his sledge.’

I looked. I craned my neck to see over the high backs of the benches in the other room. It was true. There was a shape on the sledge, I could see it through the misted window, hunched into a ball against the whipping of the snow, motionless as a pile of rags.