A great empire is falling to bits. That’s what’s brought MacGahan here from India. The catch-all term is the Eastern Question. The rule of the Ottomans, which once swayed subjects from Baghdad to Belgrade, down the Levant, and across Northern Africa, is in terminal disarray. It’s menaced by the fresher energy of younger empires – British, Russian, French – and the new stories of nationhood. For a few decades more it will limp along before collapsing entirely. It will be wound up at Sèvres; its possessions reapportioned by the Great Powers in ways that we’re still killing each other about.

The story MacGahan is chasing is this: restive Christian subjects have risen up against their Muslim rulers. Or some have. There are rumours the uprising has been put down with excessive bloodshed. From Varna, from anywhere, the truth is unclear. Spokesmen for the Ottoman government, the Sublime Porte, insist they have simply dealt with a revolt. After all, what imperial power has ever managed to get by without slapping down unruly subjects? The British government, led by Disraeli, is inclined to agree. On the Olympian chessboard of the Great Powers, the Ottoman Empire serves a useful strategic function as far as the British are concerned, blocking further thrusts by Russia towards the West.

But tales of terrible cruelty are leaking out of the Balkans. Disraeli’s old nemesis, Gladstone, denounces the Turks as bloodthirsty tyrants and Disraeli for supporting them. It is an oddly familiar pile-up: geopolitical abstractions, business interests, personal ambition and moral outrage. MacGahan, employed by a newspaper that voices liberal opinion, has been sent to find out the truth. Or, more accurately, she’s been sent to gather evidence to support one version of it. Already, in 1876, the world is inundated with competing stories. We have to try to choose wisely between them; or better, perhaps, to disbelieve them all.

MacGahan and Kolya settle the terms of his employment at the dock. She insists he writes a letter to his father to be sent home through Meakins. He borrows paper, ink, and sets to work.

It’s better to be brief than lie. He frames it as a short absence. There’s much he can’t say. (I think of Uncle Leonard, writing from the Western Front, standing on duckboards, shells passing overhead, the corpses in No Man’s Land already food for rats: ‘The meat paste arrived safely. Thank Winifred for the socks.’)

Kolya leaves out making friends with the Cossack and the part about eating pork. Perhaps that’s what his transgression meant on board the ship: an act of severance with all that lies behind. The choice seems very clear: to go home and be chastised as a child, to go on and become a man. At least, that’s how it seems to him. No parent who has ever worried about a child’s absence – in other words, no parent – will agree.

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