Chagrin gives way to darker contemplation.

So much of Notovitch’s story isn’t quite right. The monastery’s books you’ve seen are all in Tibetan. There aren’t any at all in Pali. Why were his men speaking Pashto? Turn the map of Ladakh which way you will, you can’t fit his route plausibly on the landscape, or see where he might have raced Younghusband for the charts.

Are you content with a mystery? Do you want to press on? How much does final knowledge mean to you? If there is no book, it implies scenes different from the ones he revealed; the gaps in his story obscure another Nicolas: one who never shed a final allegiance to his father’s faith, who, as Vincenzo guessed, envisaged and created a text that might undo the bloody fictions that had pursued his people for centuries: a man who never gave up searching for the better story.

And for this man’s end, how much further will you look? Cast handfuls of powder in the flame? Heat volatile metals in the alembic? Apply to the mayoral rolls in Paris? Search in back issues of old newspapers to find an article about his son, a wine merchant, inaugurating a Franco-American trade association in New York? Examine the livers of animals without a mark on them?

Here, on the rocks beside the road south to Manali, is a tent, the abode of an oracle, the shaman of a group of Ladakhi nomads; it smells of goats. Put silver in the thin brown hand. Cast the bones. Her eyes roll back in her head. The temperature drops below freezing with the sunset. In your deranged state, it appears that smoke is issuing from her mouth. She’s speaking in the language of the secret books. What is it exactly that you need to know?

*

IT IS 1939. All that’s left of Étoile du Nord is the shuttered premises. Inside, there’s damp, loose carpet and horizontal mannequins where wealthy Parisians once tussled over the spring collections. A decade of economic blight has eaten away at the business. Nicolas’s trip to London failed to turn up a buyer for the store and depleted precious savings, making any hope of transcribing the rolls impossible. Nicolas and Anya are compelled to economise. Old age, shame and increasing poverty combine to bring about a contraction of their circle. On a rare social excursion, Nicolas has his troubling encounter with the duchess. Father David died years ago. His replacement is a young émigré called Father Gerasim, who has left Russia to get away from the communists. The experience of religious persecution has, paradoxically perhaps, made him more narrow-minded and intolerant. He’s a stickler for convention. Father Gerasim has a thick sable beard that he likes to gather in his fist like a pigtail when he’s listening. In his eyes, there often seems to be a secret joke, but it’s never clear at whose expense.