The stone pillars of the town gates were grey against the yellow sky, snow filled the thick clouds but none had come down now for several hours. Something had happened though, to the woman.

She lay now, in the bottom of the sledge. The black dog that had come in the night sat on her feet, as if trying to keep them warm. But she was frozen hard; her hair, when I lifted a piece that had slipped out from her shawl onto her face snapped between my fingers like a frozen reed. I prised open the crisp folds of her clothing – the fur wrap, her grey woollen shawl – and found her hands. I began to chafe them with snow.

Pyotr watched, frowning. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Let Pyotr.’

He was strong, Pyotr. Short and stocky and wide. Even so, he couldn’t move her. He put his arms around the lumpy parcel of her body but it seemed to cling with a kind of obdurate force to the sledge. She was frozen and stuck to it. He went inside and came back with a rope, looped it around her and pulled. There was a sharp snap as she broke free from the ice and then he lifted her in his arms and carried her, like a small frost-covered pine tree, into the warm.

The fire was low now, there were just a few embers left glowing in the grate. Mostly it was ash. I raked up what was there and threw on a new log. The Cossack was still sitting up but he was dozing now. Pyotr laid the frozen woman at his feet by the hearth.

Under the fur wrap and her woolly grey shawl she had on one of those pretty, brightly embroidered dresses, like the ones the Sadler’s Wells dancers had worn when Geoffrey took me to see The Rite of Spring a few years before for my birthday. The most striking thing about her, though, was her face, still furious and indignant, gazing out from beneath a thin carapace of ice, like something trapped in a pond, or behind the clouded glass of an old mirror. The effect was curious and unsettling; it was clear to me now that she was dead.

On the bench beside me the Cossack no longer slept. He was sitting without moving, just staring at the body of the frozen woman at his feet.