I had different hopes for this journal of mine, I must admit. I had envisaged travel and adventure, but on my own terms. I had imagined myself out acquiring wisdom in the wild, and taking good note of it. I had it in my head to prove myself and improve myself; to discover a fresh path a man might take and to walk it like a man. I read The New Wonderful Magazine, and Marvellous Chronicle and its tales of remarkable things beyond the seas: bearded women, Bedouins, men who transformed into women and women who transformed into men, the spontaneous combustion of human beings. All these are true in the world, if not in Ireland and England, the two parts of it I know best. They are not true in Vienna either, but they are true somewhere, in exotic climes.

I have read The Pilgrim’s Progress and found it most instructive, and have with me my Robinson Crusoe and my copy of John Ledyard’s journal of his voyage on the Resolution. I harbour urges to journey, beyond the journey of escape, and I harbour an unanswered restlessness. As Captain Woodes Rogers said upon rescuing Selkirk, ‘One may see that solitude and retirement from the world is not such an insufferable state of life as most men imagine.’ I feel that ever more keenly today, as Vienna offers no prospect of solitude, or retreat, or withdrawal, save, for now, this little room Doctor Haydn has kindly provided me, in which to hide away.

My great-uncle Andrew joined the Habsburg Imperial Army at fourteen; my uncle John the Royal Navy at fifteen. That was his age when he first served as a midshipman under Nelson. There is a nobility to those choices, and also to a steadfast journey into the unknown, trusting in faith, but there is no nobility to flight. I have taken action of necessity, not because I am a man of it.

Uncle Andrew fought the Seven Years’ War when he was younger than I am now. He has led cavalry into battle, and led them out of it victorious. He fought a duel and killed his opponent to marry my aunt Barbara, a Bohemian heiress. He is of the belief that men were not given vigour of body for it to go unexercised. The kindest words he has yet said to me in Vienna are that a man can only till the ground he is given to stand on. It is now up to me to show him my shoulder is put willingly to the plough.

The most recent letter I received from my grandmother, before the war stopped the movement of correspondence, told me that my uncle John is to take command of a new third-rate ship of the line, HMS Victorious. I am of military stock, on my father’s side, but instead I am fourth-rate at the violoncello, lower as a composer and with a modest facility for languages.