His words hung between them in the freezing night; it occurred to me that it was the cold and nothing else that had brought him out to her. It wasn’t because he wanted to be the one to make peace between them; everything about him was grudging and reluctant; he was as morose and brimful of dislike as she was; it was only the danger she was in that had made him come out – the dark travelling shawl she had on might have been good enough for the day but it would not see her through the night. He stood there for another few minutes while she remained seated on the sledge, mulishly still as before. At one point he held out his hand to her in a cool, unwilling kind of way but when she didn’t take it he let it fall, and in one final furious gesture, he took off his coat and threw it, knife and all, onto the sledge, so it covered her shoulders like a blanket, and then he came marching back into the inn, alone.

Inside, on the low table by the fire, the piece of brown paper lay as before. The man picked it up now, folded it, and put it away inside his shirt. He didn’t ask if I had a room, he just wrapped his giant’s arms around himself and leaned against the high back of the bench and sat there, glaring into the fire.

Sometimes I wonder if at some half-conscious level, I knew then what had happened between them.

If I did, I wasn’t aware of it; when I discovered the truth, it came to me, I swear, as a revelation.

I didn’t go to bed. From time to time during the night and early morning I looked out through the window at the woman on the sledge. It was one of the drawbacks of the inn that we had no covered place for the horses and the sledges, only an open shelter with a beaten tin roof which kept out some of the wind but not the cold and not much of the snow. She wasn’t wearing the man’s coat. It lay behind her like a big dead animal. Still she sat, straight as a pole, though as the hours passed, her body began to shake. Around two o’clock the snow stopped falling; it was too cold now for snow. A crust of ice formed on the leather traces of the sledge and around the woman’s shawl and on the tops of her boots.

Twice in the night I went out with Pyotr, once with a fur wrap and once with some stew; she thanked us for both but when I said, would she come in out of the cold and sit by the fire? she shook her head.

‘Not if he’s in there.’

Towards morning we went out for the last time.