The getaway vehicle – a light trap with two horses – stood half a mile away. Disoriented by the darkness, Nicolas was momentarily uncertain of the cause of the flash and crump that split the silence like an artillery shell.

It was only afterwards that Nicolas realised that in his haste he’d forgotten to put on his rubber galoshes and had spilled acid on his shoe. Anaesthetised by the adrenaline and excitement, he felt only a slight stinging at the time; later, in the first light of dawn, the injury was revealed to be more serious: most of the fourth and fifth toes on his left foot had been eaten away. At the sight of bone, Nicolas passed out like a damsel in a romance novel.

Bessie and the getaway driver helped Nicolas into the train carriage. She was supposed to depart on a later express, but chose to remain with him as the train pulled out of the station, treating the injury with the calcium gluconate gel that she had presciently brought in her midwife’s bag. Despite the wound, both she and Nicolas felt reckless, powerful, and giggly with disbelief at their triumph. The risk they’d undergone together was a fresh kind of intimacy. They noticed it at the same time and were both suddenly self-conscious. Their eyes met briefly. Bessie was the first to look away and continued to bandage his foot.

But later, in the darkness, Bessie whispers Nicolas’s name and pulls the blanket from his bunk. He wakes instantly and yields without hesitation. Even in the dark, Nicolas is aware of a change in her body. Her breasts are not the high, halved apples he remembers from the rainy afternoon in his apartment. She’s more tender, more soft, more passionate.

At breakfast – fresh baguette, filthy coffee, ravenous appetites – he broaches the subject hesitantly. ‘Did you … conceive a child?’

The way she sets the baguette down, the flush in her cheeks, the suppressed consternation, all say yes before her mouth does. ‘The baby was stillborn. A girl.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Nicolas.

‘She was Pierre’s. He never met her, but he claimed he knew it was a girl.’

Nicolas is stirred by the revelation. He wants to say that Verzilov was never modest about his powers of prediction, but this isn’t the moment.

Bessie smiles. ‘It was a lucky guess. He wanted to call her Marianne.’

‘The goddess of liberty?’

She shrugs as if to say: that was Pierre. From her dismissiveness, Nicolas understands that those dreams of revolution are old ones.

When does he realise? Is it then? Or later, parting at the station with muted farewells and suppressed smiles at his limp? Or afterwards, watching her make her way through the crowd, the flash of her bonnet vanishing in the press of people? Yes, it is then, it is at the last possible moment that he knows he loves her.