Kolya’s imagination snags on a single word: India! It conjures a jasmine-scented dream of geometric gardens, Mughal domes and ankle bracelets that is abruptly dispelled by the arrival of his father, who is carrying the fine scales and still sucking the remains of his supper from his teeth. Kolya feels an unaccountable pang at seeing the curve of his father’s back as he stoops to fuss over the brass pans. With the hindsight of sixty years, such tiny things will seem like the mutterings of destiny.

The money is sound; the journalist accepts the poor terms she is offered. Within an hour, the provisions are being loaded by moonlight aboard Meakins’s boat, the Derby. Only the visiting card tucked into the pages of the medical textbook is proof to Kolya that the apparition was real.

Later that night, lying wakefully in bed, Kolya hears the water lapping at the wharf. He thinks of the sea wrinkling under the moonlight as it spreads eastwards from Kerch to Jason’s Colchis on the Georgian shore, and westwards past the Hellespont, to the pirate coast of Barbary and beyond.

He packs a canvas bag with a few possessions and creeps out into the darkness. He sees with the clear-eyed heartlessness of his seventeen years that this is a chance that will not come again.

‘The Derby was a vessel of sturdy English construction that had been retired to the Black Sea after the opening of the Suez Canal.’

Slipping out into the warm night is like putting on a disguise. Kolya has become invisible. He is a sigh of breath in his nostrils. He is the strap of a bag cutting into a shoulder. He is the sound of footsteps.

The air at the dock is sour with tar and oil and the drain-like smell of bilge. But nothing can be more magnificent than the sight of the wharf in moonlight. Kolya hears murmured voices, singing, the notes of an accordion, the creak of a canvas hammock, as he swings his bundle over the stern of the ship and creeps below. He has provisioned the Derby on so many occasions that all her hiding places are well known to him. He finds himself an empty locker to the aft of the ship into which he crawls and falls asleep. This willing sleep is the property of youth that he will yearn for more than any other in old age.

Dawn breaks. Kolya is startled awake by the sound of pistons hammering in the engine room beneath him. In his bag is some rye bread and brynza, soft ewe’s cheese that he has taken from the pantry. He looks at the stolen food with a sickening remorse. What has he done? Worse, he has forgotten to bring water and his tongue feels thick with thirst.