Kolya waits to be dismissed, but MacGahan is not done with him. Jabbing at the boy with the fork for emphasis, she asks him a question through a mouthful of cutlet. ‘Tell me something, son: why did you come aboard this ship?’

MacGahan leans back in her seat and holds up an admonitory finger as Kolya launches into the explanation he gave the captain. ‘Not the crap you told Meakins. When there are stories to make up, I’ll be the one to do it.’

Kolya’s lips form a guilty smile. From the moment he saw MacGahan, she awoke a bud of longing in his heart. He recalls that sensation in the shop – that imagined jasmine blossom whose perfume seemed to snag inside him like a silver fish hook. But he knows he can’t say that. He shrugs. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Then let me tell you. Your father wants you to become a doctor, right? You think, five years of study? Forget that. It’s a third of my life on earth …’

‘I’m nearly eighteen.’

She dispatches his mathematical quibble with a contemptuous wave. ‘You’ve had it with the chandlering business. You see me and you’re saying to yourself, I’d follow her into the cannon’s mouth. Right? It’s the fantasy of mousy clerks everywhere. You all dream of being Tamburlaine. But you can’t guess what it cost me to live this life. And if you could guess, you wouldn’t pay it.’

Working as a shopkeeper in a port city has given Kolya a thorough grounding in human nature: drunks, misers, traders, swindlers, repentant spendthrifts trying to return ruined merchandise. Kolya knows MacGahan is in the market for something. He recognises her rudeness as a haggler’s gambit, one he’ll adopt as his own: disprizing the product you plan to buy.

The truth is MacGahan has taken a shine to Kolya. She liked him from the start, from the moment her gold coins failed to dazzle him. Now he works hard to impress her further. He tells Dass she’s asked for him to deliver her trays. He scurries back and forth from her cabin uncomplainingly with hot tea when she is laid low by the sickening swell. He makes it clear that she could do a lot worse than hire him as a servant. She knows it doesn’t hurt to travel with a male companion. Above all, she needs a translator. When she asks if he knows any Bulgarian, he has no hesitation in claiming fluency. Is it even a lie if he can make it come true eventually?

‘My recollection of these incidents has raised an issue which I had hoped to delay addressing …’

A clock chimes four in the parlour on Finchley Road. Vincenzo unwraps a fresh cylinder and mounts it in the Imperator. Notovitch gets slowly to his feet and holds a taper to the mantles of the gas lamps.