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!’

Perhaps it was this entreaty from his parrot that led Doctor Haydn to take charge and call us all, his trembling household, to the bones of his arms as he sat there propped up in his bed. Regrettably, our household is incomplete, as Johann remains in Eisenstadt. I am yet a poor substitute for him, a boy proven by the night to be just that and no more, a fledgling tucking himself under the old Kapellmeister’s wing at the first invitation.