Her order complete, the woman draws a handful of unfamiliar gold coins from a leather knapsack to pay for the purchases. Kolya hesitates. She asks what is the matter. He says he can’t accept the money, the coins are not a currency he recognises. ‘These are gold dollars from the United States Mint,’ she says. Kolya is steadfast. She names the usual rate of exchange and hints that she is willing to accept a punitive one. Still Kolya will not budge.

‘I need to get under way before dawn to meet my schedule,’ she says. ‘What do you suggest I do?’

Kolya, by now, is flustered. He wants to help this stranger, but he is too much his father’s son to accept the strange coins. He asks her to wait, and, stepping into the street, rouses one of the drunks who patronise the liquor counter to go and fetch his father.

As the unsteady steps die away in the distance, Meakins and the woman sit down on two crates of Kazan soap. The woman quizzes Kolya about the book he is reading. He tells her he is studying to be a doctor. She is sensitive enough to catch a note of wistfulness in his voice; she presses him and learns he has dreams of making a living with his pen, of writing stories for newspapers and thick, learned journals.

‘Imagine,’ she says to Meakins with exaggerated irony. ‘A writer!’

Kolya assumes he’s being mocked. He explains, defensively, that it’s not a dream that comes from nowhere. He has a cousin, Osip, nine years older, who grew up across the water in Taganrog. He lives in Saint Petersburg and edits a paper called Novosti. Each proper noun – Osip, Saint Petersburg, Novosti – seems to emerge from Kolya’s mouth in a bubble of awe and pride. ‘One day I will work for him.’

Not ‘would like to’, mind, or ‘hope to’: will. The note of certainty and upward reach is as out of place in the dingy shop as – what? – well, the woman herself.

She puts a hand into her knapsack and presents Kolya with a visiting card. He sounds out the roman letters in his head. Wednesday MacGahan. London Daily News.

‘I am the chief foreign correspondent of the Daily News,’ she says. ‘Founded by Charles Dickens. The greatest newspaper in the world.’ It’s not a boast. She says it with a gravity that is intended to honour the boy’s ambition.

‘You’re a writer?’ Kolya’s face has the naked amazement of someone who has encountered a creature from a dream.

Indeed she is. The astonishing stranger tells him that she has recently travelled overland from India. Her paper has received intelligence of an uprising in the Ottoman lands of Bulgaria and she is intending to file dispatches. She has engaged Meakins to take her across to the Black Sea port of Varna. His ship is being coaled for its voyage.