‘He was hounded and disbelieved as prophets are apt to be, but many people took his writings for the truth, my parents among them. They followed him to Far West, Missouri, to Nauvoo, and on his death they made the great trek west to the red lands of the Salt Lake Valley, where I was born.

Kolya’s head aches from his dissipation. His tongue is dry. But he feels emboldened to speak. ‘Was Smith a fraud?’

‘Of course, I think so. But I’ve found some sympathy for him in my heart as I’ve gotten older. He was a farmer’s son who wasn’t cut out to be a farmer and I was a girl who wasn’t cut out to be my family’s idea of a woman. We both had to alter the world a little to find our place in it.

‘The other thing is this: there are some kinds of belief that make stories come true. The kindest take I can have on old JS is that he saw something in the eyes of his congregants that made his lies seem real. It’s as though you said abracadabra, or talitha kum, but not in earnest, and yet you found it made a dead child breathe again. What would you make of that? You’d doubt your own insincerity then. Either you or the words must have some magic.’

‘What about you?’

‘My own story is one I’m not comfortable telling.’

‘How did you come to leave?’

‘There was the wife of a minister I’ll always be grateful to. In the Civil War, I nursed and I learned I could write and that I was brave. I followed a woman I loved to Paris and was there for the Commune. I filed dispatches for the New York Globe. That was the beginning of another life that in a roundabout way brought me here. That’s as much as you need of my story, Nick. And it’s time for us to be going.’

*

MACGAHAN RISES WEARILY from the cushions, clean, sated, talked out. She makes small gifts of money to the girls and settles the account with the obsequious patron.

Night is falling in the streets outside. Ovens are being lit. A crescent moon hangs over the Bosphorus. Many miles to the east, in Kolya’s home, the sabbath has begun.

Out of all that he has heard, what stays with Kolya is one image: Joseph Smith, scrying the gold tablets with his magic eyepiece, dictating the gospel to his confederates. Hold that in your thoughts.

‘For two years, I travelled with MacGahan.’

The drumbeat of war means good business for arms-dealers, ship-builders, brothel-keepers, and journalists.

MacGahan and, increasingly, Kolya, are in demand. Embedded with the Russian Army, MacGahan writes for the Daily News. Kolya begins sending articles to his cousin Osip in Saint Petersburg who writes back excitedly to commission more. Quick, brave, energetic: Kolya makes an excellent correspondent. He also has a flair for local colour and a tendency to manufacture quotes, though is neither the first nor last young journalist to do so. He is exhilarated to be living by his pen. He borrows his cousin’s new surname for his byline: Notovitch.