Hanbury told me he has seen Sydney Gibbes, who is back in England and training for the church. He gave Hanbury a greatcoat button of the Tsarevitch’s, which Hanbury keeps in his pocket.

There is a Russia in my imagination that is not the Russia we know today, a murderous rabble recalling nothing more accurately than the France of the 1790s in its wilful bloodletting. But nor is the Russia I see a place of princes and serfs. It is a Russia that might have been, and that the Emperor, I believe, was willing to bring into being. His son most certainly was. But we failed to take food to the people when they needed it, and we failed to take the boy to a safe place.

I left the guard house in those final hours of 1916 and stood for a time at the edge of the light. Out in the night, I could make out the trunks of birch trees, standing pale like a detachment of sentries from a ghostly army. And beyond them nothing but a dense darkness. Finland, Sweden, the sea, all of it dark. The only thing moving was my breath drifting up into the lights.

Then the Tsarevitch’s face came to the window of our railcar – his face with his hands around it, staring out into the night. He was looking at the boy who was lying in the snow. The soldiers had gone but the boy’s body was still there, the piece of coal still on the ground a foot away from his hand. The soldiers hadn’t even picked it up.

1809

Vienna

11th May, 1809

I could die tonight.

I did not die as a criminal at the Mayo assizes; I did not die at the hands of the drunken highwayman on the dark road to the Cove of Cork; but I could die tonight. Such was my sole thought as the bombs landed on Vienna not four hours ago.

Doctor Haydn called out to us, ‘Have no fear, children. Where Haydn is, no harm can reach you,’ as though his old arms might have saved anything, but in that moment the fear had hold of us and any comfort was willingly taken.

Frau Meyer had brought a fresh pan to his bed, should he require it in the night, and I had been in the music room, winding down the bows on the violins and violoncello. Such calm preparations for repose these now seem, their tranquillity shattered by the tumult that followed.

By the crash of the second bomb upon the neighbourhood, Fraulein Kremnitzer was up the stairs and with us too, her arms in a tight embrace around the picture of the Blessed Virgin that, in more usual times, hung on the wall in her room. Jaco lost his bearings, knocking his perch to the floor, soiling the rug, shedding a lustrous blue quill and shrieking, ‘Papa! Papa Haydn! Papa Haydn!’