Every time Bessie assists at a birth, she thinks of her sister. Every miraculous slippery child she lays with its purple umbilicus on a mother’s belly is, however briefly, her niece. And for all Bessie’s many good qualities, she lacks a capacity for forgiveness. Revolutionary virtue tends towards the pitiless. Mind you, Nicolas is hardly innocent. Imagine if she knew the scope of his project for Suvorin – presenting the anarchists to bourgeois readers like prepared slides of microbes, or stuffed exotic birds.

Believe me, it breaks my heart that they can’t be together. How much I’d like to write of their love mellowing, the minutiae of their shared life, of all they might undertake with each other. But in this version of the secret books, the two of them dwell in incompatible stories.

‘In 1883, I was received into the Orthodox Church.’

Yes, Nicolas became a Christian.

That is the what; but why?

The old man we and Vincenzo know tends to pooh-pooh the religious stirrings of his younger self – a reversal that implies to me the frustration of a disappointed mystic. We needn’t be so dismissive.

I think that behind the urge to faith somehow lies a primary experience of love: something Nicolas felt dimly but certainly in Bessie’s presence: awe, the communion of things, the sense of brimming with melancholy at the transience of this beautiful life. He has an intuition that he doesn’t end where he thought he did and that the world penetrates him deeply; he knows we are spiritually involved with it and with each other, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Well, speaking of the ineffable is bound to make fools of us.

In his thorough way, he visits a variety of priests: Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox. Why not a mullah, why not a rebbe? What is wrong with the faith of his parents?

I can only offer you reasons: He feels it is a fault in him to lack certainty and overcompensates by choosing something that feels like decisive progress. It is a final break with his past. It is a calculated step to enhance the prospects for his career, which will go more smoothly by far for a proper Christian than a wavering ex-Jew. It is a refutation of Bessie’s anarchism. He feels called to honour his father’s death by committing himself to something obscurely serious. It is some or all of these.

The priest who instructs him is a Georgian called Father David Chikladze. Explicating the parable of the yeast in Matthew 13, verse 33, the priest recalls his childhood in Khaketi, and the annual vintage of saperavi grapes. Trodden in the press, the grapes produce a juice the colour of arterial blood, which the action of the wild yeasts transforms into something intoxicating, something more fully alive. Just like this, he continues, the Holy Ghost animated the red clay of Adam.