From Fitzroy's Private Diary (Extract 100)

I am not a man who is prone to introspection. Nor, indeed, do I often reflect on the past. I suppose I occasionally mull over whether or not it was necessary to kill an opponent. Could I have achieved my mission without any loss of life? However, even the service discourages such backward glances and second guesses. Oh, they want you to think about your performance, to improve on your ability to do the job, or note skills which need upgrading, or are absent, but considering paths you might have taken is not something they’re big on. Neither am I, in the general way of things.

Regret is a hostile country, and for the most part I manage to avoid it. But tonight, on the eve of my birthday, as I have done for many years, I look back upon my life. For the first time ever, I have contemplated how my life might have turned out if I my mother had lived. 

I know that the single most devastating event in my life was the loss of my mother in a horse-riding accident when I was nine. For a long time, I blamed myself for not being with her. I can’t even today remember why I didn’t go, but as an adult I know that back then I would have had no way of stopping her bolting horse and, in fact, I would have felt even more guilty. As it was, I blamed my father, who had sold her favourite mare without telling her. I hated him already for the distance he kept from me - I, being so much younger than the children of his first wife. As I have grown older and having discovered that the whole of my mother’s dowry was put in trust for me, not given as a marriage portion, I have wondered even more deeply on their relationship. 

My mother was intelligent, charming, and full of spirit. She undoubtedly set the bar high for any other woman in my life. I measured her entire sex against her. But it also meant I recognised, unlike the majority of my own sex, that women can be just as intelligent (if not more intelligent) than men, and that a woman of spirit is a truly a force to behold. Although neither of us knew it at the time, my mother convinced me that women had a role to play in the SIS, and from my earliest days in the service, I championed their cause.

So how could this paragon of a woman have loved the curmudgeon that was my father? She never discussed their relationship with me, so I will never know. She certainly wanted me to treat my father with respect, and I know she encouraged him to spend time with me. Perhaps our dislike of each other was rooted in some subconscious oedipal complex, where we both competed for her attention.

Oddly, it was my father’s morals I inherited. I had discovered my mother weeping. I must have been seven or so, and it was the housekeeper, who finally answered my insistent demands to know what was wrong. She said my father had acquired another lady who kept him company from time to time. Of course, I had no real understanding of what it meant back then. Despite that, I was furiously angry.

Now I have, if not copious then more than is usual, intimate relationships with women. I like women, and I like their company as well the more physical side of things. Although, I admit my keenness in that area has increased rather than diminished from my younger years. If a man bothers, there are so many things to learn about the art of making love. 

It is important to me that a woman chooses to be with me. Seduction, I reserve for an ambassador’s or foreign dignitary’s wife, and I try not to take such an episode to its ultimate conclusion.

I suppose, unlike many of blustering contemporaries, I have never been scared by women, or their criticism. Although, I admit, I dislike being on the wrong side of Alice. That does make me uncomfortable.

If I am to pull on all these threads, what do I find? If my mother had lived, I would have stayed in college. I would have taken her punting, and for elegant picnics on the riverbank. All women would have had to have measure up to her, and her morality.

I suspect I would have become something in the diplomatic circle, or possibly, with my parents’ connections, even attached to the Royal Court. I would have searched for the perfect bride, and my mother, being who she was, would have loved anyone I brought home to be her daughter. Perhaps things might have eased between my father and I (though I doubt it). And then, when the accession came my way, I would have sat in the House of Lords and been endlessly annoying to the politicians in power.