Meanwhile, his family has gone the other way. Something has caused them to cling more tightly to their ancient faith. It’s partly how they’ve responded to the loss of him, and partly reflects a wider movement, a religious renewal that’s touched many Jews. ‘You look like a real Russian gentleman,’ his mother says, without joy.

His father sketches out the events of the last two years: the business slackened off after Kolya left; sickness. They wanted to be closer to his wife’s family. In everything the old man says, Nicolas hears an unspoken reproach: this is your fault.

They couldn’t be less interested in his war stories. He tries to tell them about MacGahan, but whatever he says is received with pained incredulity. He feels about thirteen again. His new boots chafe.

The atmosphere in the apartment presages a looming storm. Then, a mere six hours after he’s arrived, a messenger turns up. It’s a boy from the telegraph office who looks with envious eyes at Kolya’s dapper clothes as he hands over an envelope. More than any of his abortive boasts, Kolya’s ease with this strange interruption signals to his parents how much he has changed. He tips the boy and asks him to wait. It’s from General Skobelev. Kolya’s vision grows blurry as he reads the words: MacGahan. Typhus. Istanbul. Regret.

‘This coat was hers.’

Chapan. Vincenzo repeats the word. ‘From Uzbek,’ the old man says, offering him the sleeve to touch, its hem rubbed shiny and soft from decades of use. ‘Too big for me, in fact. I found it in a steamer trunk after her second funeral.’

Margaret Ann MacGahan – Wednesday, of course, was a fiction she devised in part to be eye-catching, in part to obscure her sex from her readers – was buried in the Greek cemetery in Istanbul and reburied in Salt Lake City two years later.

The change of venue, Kolya thought, would not have pleased her much, but seeing as he missed the funeral the first time around, and seeing that grateful Bulgarian-Americans were paying for the reinterment, and seeing that the paper Novoe Vremya had offered him good money for a series of reports on the American West, he made the trip out to Utah. At the graveside, he expressed his condolences to her thin and weathered mother, in whose face he saw the familiar stoicism of an Eastern European peasant. The old woman insisted he take something to remember her daughter. The chapan he chose accompanied him to New York, Boston, the Niagara Falls, and then back home to Paris.

By 1880, a volume of his war reporting had already been well received. He planned to write the next one in French to reach a wider market. Travel books, military history, royal biographies and current affairs would flow from his pen over the coming years, but he’d only be remembered for one.