The Chinese scholar-poet Chuang Tzu famously claimed to be uncertain if he was a butterfly who dreamed he was a man, or a man who dreamed he was a butterfly. Rachkovsky has exploited a similar but less charming ambiguity. He claims that during all those years spent as a government agent, his real sympathies lay with the revolutionary terrorists.

Returning to Moscow in 1917 with a big fat file listing anyone who’s ever informed on anyone, he finds himself in a surprisingly powerful position. There’s barely a person in the new government who wasn’t compelled, at some time, to sell a piece of their integrity to Rachkovsky, either for money or to settle scores with colleagues.

Reflagged with a hammer and sickle, Rachkovsky seeks out the opponents of the new regime, enforces ideological purity, and puts his storytelling talents at the service of his new masters.

Meanwhile, his old masters are being executed in a basement in Ekaterinburg. The Tsar and Tsarina, their son, their five daughters, and the courtiers who accompanied them into exile are shot and bayoneted to death. Three books are discovered among the Tsarina’s possessions: a Russian Bible, a copy of War and Peace and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

‘I returned with a black eye and wounded pride.’

When Nicolas gets home to Paris, he finds a letter waiting from his brother in Palestine. He has guessed its contents before he opens it, but is still shaken to see the facts in black and white: his mother’s dead.

He wonders why they didn’t telegraph. With a war on, it would have been hard to make the trip, but he would have tried. He’s overwhelmed – not so much with grief, but a sense of guilt. What a bad, neglectful son he’s been. What a lot of pointless resentment he’s carried towards his parents.

Loss piles on loss. Nicolas’s wife and daughter contract the terrible strain of influenza that tears through the world, spread by demobilising armies, killing almost a twentieth of the global population.

Disregarding the risk to himself, he nurses Anya through what he fears will be her final hours. Sometime around three o’clock in the morning on 15th December 1918 she wakes up. The fever’s passed. But his daughter, Hélène, dies on Christmas Eve.

Nicolas grows close to insanity with grief. He thinks of Hélène’s last visit in the summer with his grandchildren. It made him sad then to see that she too, at thirty, was visibly ageing. In a certain light, he glimpsed incipient crow’s feet and an image of the old woman she would now never be.

*

IT IS APRIL. Outside, the city is wearing its new green.

Notovitch suggests moving the Imperator to the conservatory where the light is better, but is not strong enough to offer more than token assistance. The old man seems vulnerable. His arthritis is worse. Once or twice he loses the thread of his recollection and admits he’s been sleeping badly.