From Fitzroy's Private Diary (Extract 93)

I’ve recently had reason to ponder what I might do if I wasn’t working for the service. Before enlisting Alice, I always thought I would die on the job, that I’d go out in a blaze of glory. Hopefully my body would never be found as there’s something about cadavers that strikes me as pitiful, and I never want anyone to look upon me with pity. Especially when I’m dead. No, I thought I would die as I lived - hard, fast, and having fun.

Not a bad way to go out, but when you have a partner it’s not only your life you are threatening to take out in a dramatic and adrenaline fuelled last stand, it’s theirs as well. Although I’ve never actually put it into words, I’m fairly certain Alice is prepared to die for her country. In the field she is brave and often impulsive, but I’ll be damned if I am the one who is going to bring about her death. If anything, I have become the kind of cautious agent I always used to mock in the past.

My point is that someday I may need to retire. This is a concept I cannot fathom. I’m very good at what I do. Very, very good, and quite frankly, I don’t know what I would do if I stopped working for the department. In fact, the suspicion has crept up on me lately that I might naturally be rather a lazy person.

After school I went on to study languages. I opted for languages because I found them easy. Learning them was not like, for example, doing mathematical problems that used to make me physically sweat with effort (of course, this has now been remedied as a certain amount of that knowledge is necessary for an agent.). However, the fact remains that I chose languages because there was very little effort involved. I put effort into pursing the dean’s daughter but, other than that, I can’t recall exactly exhorting myself over anything else at University. I learned a little cane fighting, but I am a naturally well-co-ordinated fellow, and already had a certain fitness from my love of horse riding. My mother first put me up on a horse when I was three, so I find that effortless too.

Everything else I have learned has been because it was necessary to fulfil my duty. Left to myself, what would I have achieved? More languages certainly. I would have travelled the world but being cushioned by wealth, it wouldn’t exactly have been taxing. I would have pursued women and read books.  Having seen my parents’ own marriage, I doubt any single woman could have tempted me to limit my physical interests to her alone for the rest of my life. I’ve always liked good food, so I suppose it’s also possible I might have become quite fat. Especially if I spent a lot of time travelling by sea. Overall, I feel I wouldn’t have been a great success of a man. I must concede, it was the SIS that made me.

As to whether others like what the SIS made me is open to debate, but I like the man I have become. My greatest fear is that should I be forced to retire, should my work be taken from me, I will become indolent, fat and a tiresome bore, whose sole pleasure is chasing after women far too young for him, and growing an ever longer moustache. I shudder to contemplate it.

So, if I am not to die on the job, and I cannot retire, I shall have to start planning now. I shall need to become one of the faceless gentlemen who remain ‘involved’ in SIS until their natural demise. Such men hold secrets and power the likes of which few will ever understand. I shall have to build my own private empire.

Well, at least it will give me something to do on those long winter evenings when I am not on a mission and poor Alice is stuck at White Orchards.