From Fitzroy's Private Diary (Extract 94)

I believe I am peripatetic by nature. But, even so, I need a tether. Something that drives me to pick myself up when exhaustion all but overwhelms me and return from whatever insanity I have been forced to confront.

 This last mission threw me back on my own basic resources more than I have experienced in the last decade. At the beginning, and at the end, I was alone. There were colleagues I encountered in the midst of the chaos, and as sometimes happens, none of them survived. It couldn’t be helped. We got the job done. All of us agreed that the mission was more important than personal considerations. My survival was as much about luck as it was skill. I don’t believe in god, or fate, but I have come to believe in raw luck. How else can you explain why others just as skilled as you perish? There was no rhyme or reason to it. No one role in this mission was more dangerous than any another.

 Now I am back at my flat. London is as it always is, busy, crowded and filled with all the usual smells, both pleasant and unpleasant. The engines of cars and buses provide a low hum of background noise over which, every now and then, a human voice rises; the high pitch of newspaper boy hawking already outdated information about the war, or someone else simply trying to make a living selling their wares. Of course, I heard similar noises abroad. But, back here, there is an absence of gun fire, the guttural gasps, and cries of the dying and no more birdsong than the ubiquitous London pigeons. That a great swell of birdsong tends to fill the air during the lulls in battle has always astonished me. I am unsure if it is to be regarded a sound of hope, or a mockery of nature toward man, the only creature to wage war and achieve such wholesale slaughter among their own species.

 I am having difficulty in feeling at home. I find myself wandering from room to room, stupidly picking up things and contemplating their use. That I have a kitchen tap that provides clean water, a hot oven to cook food, an entire room solely for the purpose of sitting and reading, and a large (and comfortable) bed, seems incredible. At least, it does in comparison to what I recently experienced, so great was the want for the most basic of things, like food, water, and sanitation.

 Jack, as ever, is a comfort. He knows I am out of sorts, and after his initial manic leaping into the air upon my return, has now settled to follow me around my rooms, flopping down quietly at my side, when I find I have the internal capacity to stop and rest. This is not often.

 I am thinking I will go to White Orchards. It is not my home, but it has, without my knowing, become my tether to the normal world. Alice will be angry she did not accompany me. Indeed, she knew nothing of my last mission, but for once I could see no place for a woman in my team. I will try to explain, and do so without revealing what I saw, and what I did. In war we…I…do things that are…that I would not have imagined I could do. Whenever I have thought to myself that this is the lowest that I could sink in deception, death, and destruction, I have been proved wrong. If I must do worse, then that path is not one I will lead Alice down. It is one I will walk, and walk alone, without relish, and do so only because duty demands it.