Disraeli’s opponents will pronounce his support of Turkey monstrous. The voices calling for Russian intervention in the Balkans will grow louder. The Tsar will declare war on the Turks a few months later and enter the conflict. Turkey will turn to its old ally, Britain, for help, but the British will demur this time, citing the public outrage over the massacres. Russia will crush the Turkish army. Bulgaria will throw off Ottoman rule and begin to govern itself for the first time in five hundred years.

‘After that,’ the old man says, ‘who could doubt the power of a story?’

‘I often asked myself: what kind of woman was she?’

MacGahan consigned her report to the United States Consul in Istanbul on 10th August 1876, to be carried in the diplomatic bag to London. There would be a delay of almost two weeks between the lighting of the fuse and the explosion.

In the interim, Kolya saw her visibly wilt. Returning from the consulate to the pension where they were staying, she took to her bed with a high fever. She talked to herself and appeared to hallucinate, addressing Kolya by unfamiliar names. He was concerned enough to fetch a doctor.

The landlady recommended a Frenchman, a portly Lyonnais gentleman who was a disciple of Charcot. He palpated MacGahan’s tongue, and prescribed quinine and plenty of rest.

‘Nervous exhaustion,’ he confided to Kolya. ‘This is something very common in cases of sexual inversion. The constitution is subject to special strains—’

MacGahan spat a filthy oath from the sweaty bed sheets. ‘Tell the quack to go—’

Kolya reddened and ushered the doctor through the antechamber and out of the door. He could hear the springs squeaking as MacGahan rose angrily from the bed. ‘I’ll give him sexual inversion!’

It was a while before he could persuade her to lie down, but the outburst of rage seemed to do her some good. The colour returned to her lips as she settled her head on the pillow.

Kolya offered his own prescription: vodka, the panacea of the Russian Empire. The dubious rationale was that it would help sweat out the fever. But vodka was nowhere to be had, so he fetched a bottle of raki, stoppered with a twist of brown paper, a loaf of bread, and a lemon.

MacGahan swallowed half a tumbler and made an extraordinary face: she looked glassy-eyed and breathless, like a carp in a fisherman’s basket. Kolya handed her a cube of bread to sniff. Unaware of the correct etiquette, she ate the bread, then took the bottle and splashed some liquor in a tooth-mug, saying, ‘I don’t like to drink alone.’

Kolya had never drunk spirits before, but his father ran a profitable sideline in alcohol, which was served from a little hatch adjoining the hardware shop. He had witnessed enough drinking to know exactly how it should be done: expelling the air from his lungs, he knocked back the raki in one gulp, and inhaled strongly through a cube of bread held to his nostrils. One eye watered a little. MacGahan poured each of them another shot.