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.

On my desk is a jiffy bag from the London Library containing two of his forgotten books. It’s been there for weeks, but I’ve yet to open it. I’m doing so now, tearing through the packet’s yellow paper. One of the books is L’Empereur Alexandre II, published in 1884. It’s the other volume that makes me gasp: Russie et L’Alliance Anglaise, published in 1906, but with the following inscription written shakily and belatedly on the flyleaf: ‘To her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent, respectful homage accompanies my highest regards for the health and happiness of your noble and gracious Royal Family.’ And then, beneath it, his signature in the same blue ink: Nicolas Notovitch, 15th January 1939, Paris.

Running my finger along the words, I have the uncanny and vertiginous sense of uncovering a piece of history. No one knew that Notovitch had lived so long. And I had forgotten in my enthusiasm for the story that under these inventions lies the kernel of something real. For a giddy moment, that assemblage of mirrors lines up perfectly. The prey I’ve been stalking through the secret books swims into view. Our eyes meet briefly. It’s the one activity we’ve obviously got in common: inscribing copies of our work. There’s something pathetic about this one: thirty-three years after it was published, after an interval that included the Russian Revolution and the Great War, Notovitch made a gift of this superannuated text to a woman who would never read it; judging from the tightness of its pages, I’d say no one ever has.

This isn’t the book of his that will be remembered. By the time of its inscription, he was old, older than I’ve so far dared to imagine him: eighty, shortly to turn eighty-one. He handed her the book, after a dinner, a soirée. The country of his birth vanished in 1917 and he is by now an adopted Parisian.