I suspect it was less the money paid that saw Doctor Haydn take me on, and more something he has told me several times: ‘The English have been good to me’. He says this in a spirit of generosity, in disregard for my Irish birth, not English; his heart, as it often is, back in another century, in this instance with Mrs Schroeter, the widow of his affections in London around the time of my birth.

Uncle Drew arrived back in Vienna on the 7th of May, at the head of ten Lower Austrian Landwehr battalions, some eight thousand of the almost forty thousand men of whom he had been given command. Archduke Ferdinand Karl Joseph, I understand, has taken an army of similar size north to invade the Duchy of Warsaw, in order to provoke an uprising there against Napoléon.

I held fast to the thought of all those Austrian soldiers as I ventured into the night. The French outside the walls would pay no mind to me, scuttling the streets and laneways like an insect, moving from one cover to the next. Beyond our neighbourhood, people were about in greater numbers, and operating in a fashion that seemed more governed by chaos than order; citizens and men with weapons running from homes and posts to check on each other, the injured moaning, the bereaved wailing and cursing. I came upon a contingent of student militia who were all drunk and who had stopped to release their water onto the wall of a house, the musket of one of them discharging into the ground as he did so, giving the others an awful fright, making them spread their mess far and wide.

I knew my great-uncle had set up a command post, and found him there, his adjutant, Hauptmann Koestler, and other officers around him, a large map of Vienna and surrounds opened on a table, one corner held down by a deformed piece of iron round-shot. He had marked on the map the locations of Napoléon’s troops, and I saw they were now on three sides of Vienna, these positions having been claimed during the day. I noted that the palace at Schönbrunn was already within the territory lost to them.