On a rainy afternoon in Nicolas’s garret, Bessie takes his virginity. Imagine it as you wish, but the dominant notes were tenderness and love.

‘She found our political differences insurmountable.’

Rain patters on the windowpanes. The wind cat’s-paws the water in the flooded gutters. Nicolas wakes and stretches languorously. The sheets feel airy and cool. How long has he been sleeping? It must be close to eight. The light is fading. A single candle on his writing desk illuminates that corner of the room with a penumbra the colour of honey and love.

Bessie, naked except for MacGahan’s dark-blue chapan, sees Nicolas rousing himself from sleep.

In a shrill, cold voice she reads aloud: ‘“The far-seeing Tsar understood that the yoke of serfdom must be lifted from the neck of his suffering people.”’ She waves the papers in the air. ‘What bullshit is this? Don’t you mean: “The bloodthirsty tyrant realised his days were numbered if he didn’t stop enslaving his own subjects”?’

Nicolas hears the new note of harshness in her voice. Until now, he believed eyes flashing in anger were purely a literary device.

‘Bessie, sweetheart, please. It’s just a book.’ He opens his arms in a gesture intended to placate her.

‘Don’t sweetheart me, chauvinist fucker! You lied! Stooge! Patsy! Reactionary scum!’

The change in her is so sudden and intense that he finds it, of all things, funny. She’s surely joking? He risks a smile.

Bessie takes a step towards him and spits right in his face. She is shaking with rage. Please, Lord, let this be a bad dream, he thinks. He closes his eyes in the vain hope that when he opens them they’ll be back in bed, lovers again, or at least on speaking terms. But all he feels is the spit, issue of her pert, lovable mouth, going cold on his face, paralysing him like cobra venom, turning his body into marble. He stands motionless while she gathers up her clothes and leaves the room to dress abruptly on the landing.

In the coming days, Nicolas learns that the symptoms of a broken heart – lassitude, gloom, loss of appetite, an overwhelming urge to stay in bed – are very similar to influenza.

Viewed from where we’re standing, somewhere up in the celestial eighth sphere, their tiff seems pointless: two young fresh folk, lovers, Jews, divided by irreconcilable opinions of the Tsar?

But Nicolas cannot dismiss her rage as the ravings of a fanatic. Her twin sister, Gesya, belongs to the ranks of revolutionary martyrs. Tried for capital crimes in Saint Petersburg two years ago, she was sentenced to hang. On hearing the verdict, Gesya revealed that she was carrying her lover’s child and in the fourth month of pregnancy. Her punishment was commuted to hard labour in a northern penal colony. Whatever savagery and cold you can imagine, this place was worse. Gesya was separated from her child immediately after giving birth, contracted blood poisoning and died. The baby lived only a week longer.