Aleksei said no more. Wylie was right. In some ways the tsar’s death would be a blessing for all – not least for Aleksandr himself – but Aleksei prayed they could find another way.

The monastery was not far, and Baron Diebich returned with the priest within half an hour. A small crowd followed him into the tsar’s room, and he began by saying a blessing. Aleksandr opened his eyes and smiled at the sight of the priest, and when the blessing was over, he spoke weakly.

‘Thank you for coming, Father Fyodotov. I wish to confess. I ask you to hear me – not as an emperor, but as an ordinary man. Please do it quickly. I am ready for the sacrament.’

The others departed, leaving the tsar and the priest alone together.

The act of confession took almost an hour. When Fyodotov emerged, his face was sallow. Volkonsky slipped in immediately to speak with the tsar. The rest of them looked at the priest. His face was paler even than Aleksandr’s own had been. His eyes scanned the ground as he walked out of the building, afraid to look up and make contact with those of anyone else. At the door, Aleksei caught his arm and spoke to him.

‘What did His Majesty say?’ It was a question born of instinctive concern, but one that no priest could ever answer.

Fyodotov’s eyes flicked up and looked into Aleksei’s. In them Aleksei saw a fear that he had seen in few soldiers – never before in a priest. The eyes scanned his face, as if in search of – begging for – responses to the sort of question a priest might normally be expected to answer, not ask.

‘I can’t tell you,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t.’

The first time he said it, it was the normal reply of a holy man observing the sanctity of the confession. The second, it was the purest expression of fear.

VOLKONSKYu EMERGED FROM THE TSAR’S ROOM ALMOST immediately.

‘He wants to speak to you – alone,’ he said. All eyes turned to follow the direction in which the prince was looking; all except Aleksei’s. His eyes had no need to move. Volkonsky was staring straight at him.

‘Me?’ he said.

‘He says he wants to tell you about Cain.’

Aleksei glanced around the room, nodding at both Tarasov and Wylie to indicate that they should come too. All three approached the door, Aleksei in front. Volkonsky stood in the way.

‘He said just you.’

Aleksei nodded briefly, and Volkonsky let him in, stepping back across the doorway in case his word was not enough to keep the two doctors at bay.

Aleksandr lay in bed, propped up on a mound of pillows, smiling benevolently. Strange though the comparison seemed, he might easily have been mistaken for someone’s grandmother – and yet now more than ever Aleksei could think of no one more suited to rule their nation.

‘You’ve had dealings with voordalaki before, haven’t you?’ said the tsar. His voice was barely more than a murmur, but its clarity was absolute.

Aleksei nodded.

‘It seems we’ve both been keeping things from one another,’ continued Aleksandr.

‘I’ve kept nothing from your physicians,’ said Aleksei. Then he realized that now, only absolute honesty would do. ‘Almost nothing,’ he added.

‘Then bring them in.’

Aleksei went back to the door and opened it, beckoning to Tarasov and Wylie. Volkonsky looked over to his master for confirmation, and got it. The door closed behind the two doctors, and the three men sat beside their tsar; Wylie on his left, Aleksei and Tarasov on his right.

‘Do you remember your grandmother, Colonel Danilov?’ Aleksandr asked.

Images came rushing back to Aleksei of the old, decrepit house and the old, decrepit woman whom as a child – even though he had laughed at her – he had loved more than anyone in the world except his parents. As he’d grown up, his cynicism over her silly, hand-me-down stories had overtaken the kinder feelings he should always have held for her. As he’d grown old, he’d learned that much of what she had said was true – even though in her mind truth had meant merely belief – and had learned to love her once again. It was she who had first told him of the voordalak, but even before he had read the words, he had understood the meaning of Nullius in Verba and had had to wait until he saw such creatures for himself before accepting what she had told him. If he had accepted what she had said from the outset, perhaps God would not have felt obliged to provide him with proof.

A cold, clammy hand squeezed his, awakening him from his reverie. ‘Do you, Colonel?’ asked Aleksandr, clutching his hand.

Aleksei nodded.

‘My grandmother was an empress,’ explained the tsar, ‘the greatest empress Russia ever had.’ He paused for a moment, in thought. ‘The greatest leader. All over the world, they think it. The English call her Catherine the Great; La Grande in France. Yekaterina Alekseevna she was officially. I just called her babushka, though not often to her face.’

The tsar smiled, lost in similar memories to those that had washed over Aleksei moments before, but he stepped out of them more quickly.

‘She raised me to be tsar,’ he continued. ‘She knew my father would succeed her, but she could see he wasn’t right for it. Even so, they didn’t need to… I could have stopped them. Perhaps Papa was lucky; babushka never told him of the Romanov Betrayal.’

Aleksei glanced at Wylie and Tarasov. They were both staring intently at the tsar. There were tears in Wylie’s eyes. It was hard to comprehend that such depth of affection could come from a foreigner, but perhaps the affection itself proved that the once Scottish doctor was now no such thing.

‘I bet your grandmother told you stories, Danilov.’

Aleksei nodded and squeezed the tsar’s hand. Wylie’s emotion was infectious, and Aleksei doubted he would be able to speak.

‘And I bet you didn’t believe them, did you?’

A shake of the head this time.

‘Well, that’s where we differ.’ The tsar spoke with a little more gusto now. ‘Or, I suspect, where our grandmothers differed. No one with any sense would disbelieve what Yekaterina told them. Do you know what she told me?’

‘No,’ whispered Aleksei, though the tsar had already told him some of it – but it was obvious there was more.

‘She wasn’t a Romanov, you see,’ explained Aleksandr. ‘Not by blood. But in her belly she was. That’s why they told her everything – all the family did. Someone had to know, and she was the strongest any of them had ever met. So she learned the story of Pyotr, her husband’s grandfather, my great-great-grandfather. Pyotr the Great they called him. Pyotr the Sly was what she said.

‘He travelled all over the place did Pyotr. And on his travels he met the strangest of men. One of them became a close friend – travelled with him up north, to the swamplands on the Gulf of Finland. This friend told Pyotr he should found a city there, but Pyotr said it was impossible. The friend brought in engineers from his own country, and somehow – through sheer, brute force, they managed to drain part of the swamp. And that’s where Pyotr built his fortress. He named it after two saints, one of whom shared his own name – the Peter and Paul Fortress. It’s still there, more than a hundred years on – right at the centre of Petersburg.

‘After that, the rest of the city was easy to build – easier. Pyotr’s own men began to take on a greater share of the work, following the techniques that had been begun for them. I say men, but Pyotr may not have thought of them as such. They were serfs, but they were still freer than the workers they took over from.

‘And as you know, within nine years, the city was built, or built enough for Pyotr to declare it as the new capital. And Pyotr asked his friend what he could give him in exchange for his help.

‘“Half the city,” came the reply.

‘Pyotr laughed. Such audacity was unusual. “The city is the new capital,” he said. “The city is Russia. I cannot give you half Russia.”