‘Monsieur Notovitch, vous êtes gentil,’ the duchess says, when he offers to inscribe it. Did she associate the courtly old gent with a notorious tale of forty years before? Did the name stir a fragmentary recollection: the story of an old monastery, India, a suspected Russian agent? ‘Notovitch. Notovitch. That name is familiar.’ ‘Why yes, perhaps you’ve read my Souvenirs of Sebastopol, or The Pacification of Europe? Seen my drama, Mariage idéal?’

‘No, no – it’s something else, I’m sure of it.’

Looking at the title page through his reading glasses as he tries to shepherd the unruly syntax of his inscription, the old man feels his heart tighten. He’s being mocked. A sly compositor more than thirty years before inserted a rogue word repeatedly in the fine print of the list of other works. It’s there, and there, and there: three times, like an obscene sound from the back of a rowdy classroom. ‘With illustrations jésus’, ‘Available in octavo jésus’, ‘In cloth jésus wrappers’. The word is street slang for a young male prostitute, but when applied to Notovitch it has other, obviously demeaning, associations.

He closes the book in consternation and gives it to the duchess with as much composure as he can muster. Decades before, he must have made an enemy at the printers, been high-handed to a fellow in dirty overalls who enacted this jeering, belated revenge. jésus. jésus. jésus.

Suddenly it’s cold. The basement’s empty. The needle butts against the run-off on the wax cylinder.

By 1939, history has already passed its judgement on the old man. The duchess will recall it as she’s being driven home. ‘Why, Notovitch! The scoundrel who—’

The book will languish unread and be bequeathed to the London Library on her death.

By 1939, everyone knows there’s trouble ahead. Notovitch must have a better sense than most: he’s seen Batak, after all. But no one can conceive of what’s to come. This time the carpet of bones is going to stretch right across Europe.

So much for history. The secret books allow a different kind of man: alongside the ambition, the self-promotion and, let’s face it, the outright lies, there is something else: an instinct for conciliation, a desire for the better story. He’s taken more than an old coat from MacGahan. Her regrettably brief life embodied another lesson: not just the power that stories have, but their provisionality. They can all be rewritten. Hers, and his, and yours.