From Fitzroy's Private Diary (Extract 8)

I do miss being able to shoot well. I have trained myself to shoot with my left hand now and I am competent. But before my torture, I was an excellent marksman. I took part in the Olympic duelling event in 1908, where contestants wearing goggles and thick coveralls fire wax bullets at each other. I could have come first, but the attention upon myself would have been too great, so I had to content myself with second place.

There is something fundamentally pleasing to me to be able to use a gun, a sword, a cane, or any other simple self-defence instrument with efficiency. It is not the maiming or killing the interests me, it is the art, the ability as a tool wielding creature to maximise one’s potency with a swiftness and simplicity of action.

The whole grappling with another or using a cord to eliminate an adversary’s ability to breathe have never held any attraction for me. There are assassins, and I am thinking of one in particular, who revel in the close encounter, the sweat of it, the guttural noises, the vanishing of life from the eyes of the victim and the sheer adrenalin rush of extinguishing another life.

I find that repulsive. In my time I have trained others in the art of killing, but under my tutorage students learn that accelerating the mortality of another should be a last resort, unless one is in fear of one’s own life. Murder, for it is always murder in my opinion, brings with it a slew of difficulties. Not least is removing either the body or the evidence - preferably both. A more professional solution is often to discredit an opponent, so that others will take appropriate action to remove the person of difficulty from the scene. I do not mean one must inspire others to killing, permanent incarceration is often sufficient, or such shame that the targeted enemy will retire from doing whatever it is you no longer wish them to do. Though, often in such cases, the target may not have the moral fortitude to deal with the unjust accusations and will remove themselves from the material plane. In such cases, I stress to my trainees that this is the choice of the enemy they have allowed to live, and that the target has refused their generous offer is not their fault.

I have had occasion to execute more than one man. I have never done so in anger, but in knowledge that necessity demands it. Euphemia has been a witness on more than one occasion. Her reaction on these occasions is what first convinced me that she was suited to our trade. She neither gloried in my triumph, nor did she abhor it. She acknowledged that in each case the execution was necessary. In doing so, she undid her father’s lifetime of work to bring her into his church - thou shalt not kill, and all that. She had become free to look at life through the eyes of necessity, and able to weigh the good of all over the good of one. She had become morally flexible according to our craft’s rules. This was a delight to me, but no doubt her father spun in his grave, poor man.

I cannot convey enough how it annoys me that no matter what I choose to disclose to these pages, Euphemia invariably becomes a part of it. It is difficult to fashion one’s life as a loner, when another person so frequently intrudes upon it. But I am as much to blame.