From Fitzroy's Private Diary (Extract 30)

There is a saying among the more entrepreneurial of London’s stall holders that one cannot ‘con’ an honest man. The idea, I believe, is that only the greedy and the corrupt are easily parted from their money. I have never heard such utter poppycock in life.

I spend my professional life deceiving enemies of the crown. I have multiple names, and a wide range of personalities I can convincingly assume. I once tested this out by calling on my father, appearing as an overeager oenophile, determined to buy part of his cellar, and he entirely failed to see through my disguise. Manipulation is second nature to me. I consider myself to be at the height of my proficiencies, but such achievements are frequently undermined by the blatant stupidity of people.

Last night I attended a dinner party and was regaled by a lady of middling years, sitting to my left, on the wonders of Madame Viviani, who has recently infested London with her black-veiled presence. Viviani is a con artist of the first order. She relieves the gullible of their money in return for reuniting them with dead relatives via her spiritual guide, a small, squeaky-voiced child, called Mary, who sounds remarkably like Madame Viviani speaking through her nose. Fear and loss are the linchpins of the vilest predators.

Although it was proving detrimental to my appetite, I asked my dinner companion what words of wisdom her deceased one had had for her (she was going to tell me anyway, and it seemed better to move the story along apace and get it over with). She told me, having removed a handkerchief from somewhere about her person with which to dab her eyes, that her dead husband had told her to stop grieving and get on with her life. I muttered something about how generous that was of him, and received a lecture on how, in life, he had been a stickler for protocol, such as observing a full year’s mourning, but that death had enlightened him. Moreover, it seemed that every time she visited the medium, she learned more and more about her dear departed Edward, and how she was quite on her way to being more in love with him in death than she had ever been in life.

It was only my steely constitution that prevented me from losing either my supper or my temper. Such wilful and determined inanity on her part. I wondered how long it would be before Viviani suggested that her husband wanted her to bestow greater gifts upon the medium for her invaluable services. Doubtless this would occur after a few more cloying and sentimental visits during which the so-called medium, in urging her client to move on, bound her ever more tightly to her visitations. I could almost admire the cunning of it, if her ‘mark’ had not been so complicit in her own downfall. I felt no inclination to explain the deception to her. She had ruined my supper and deserved far worse.

Then, after dinner, while smoking cigars and drinking port, a member of Parliament who, rather unusually, is known for his wit and intelligence, began to praise hydro-electric therapy, which he said had quite made a new man of him. I listened to the descriptions of what he had endured and could only conclude it had been sheer luck that it had not made a corpse of him.

Not wanting to draw attention to myself, I kept my incredulousness behind my teeth. Then, the topic of the supernatural was taken up by a portly gentleman of an ever so dull disposition. Listening to him speak, ranging from gypsy curses bought by his mother to the planned exorcism of his cricket pavilion, I began to seriously consider that his soup had been laced with some kind of mind-addling drug. Another gentleman, with a caveat that none of these stores should ever leave the table, spoke of his encounter with a ghost. I waited in vain for a punchline that demonstrated this was no more than a long-winded joke, but it never came. Instead the gentlemen moved on to odder and odder experiences he had encountered, all of which I felt could simply be put down to intoxication. My night now being quite spoilt, I left early, excusing myself on grounds of a headache, which had become all too real.

The world presents enough real challenges without these foolish people concerning themselves with fictitious preternatural incidents. The service does occasionally, I admit, use a medium for the passing on of information, but she is not as predatory as the rest of her kind. She may even believe the nonsense she peddles.

If ghosts existed, as I have told my assets more than once, I would be haunted a dozen times over. There is no revenge from beyond the grave. No last messages from a loved one. Heaven has no revolving door for spirits to visit between this world and the next. When you are gone, you are gone. Life is a one-time opportunity, and people would be far better off taking full advantage of what this world has to offer than bothering themselves about what the dead might be doing in the next.