From Fitzroy's Private Diary (Extract 123)

Some people have thought me teetotal. Utter tosh. As I previously recorded, I don’t drink while on a mission for fear of alcohol affecting my razor-sharp wits and my speed of reaction to a sudden or ongoing situation (needless to say, this is like lightening when I am sober). Of course, there are times when I must drink to keep up appearances while under cover. At such times I rely on the tolerance I have built up in my free time, and even more, on sleight of hand. Once you manage to get them to a certain stage of inebriation, your mark is often so squiffy eyed that they wouldn’t notice if you produced an emu from your pocket and proceeded to dance with it.

I have known men who tip their drinks down their sleeves. This only works with shots, or half glasses of wine, and makes one intolerably sticky, not to mention upsetting one’s valet and tailor. I don’t do it.

My preferred drink, off duty, on a night by fireside, is a good brandy, accompanied by an excellent book and my dog snoring at my feet. Could a man be happier? I note here that I despise tobacco and will not smoke it, even in-character for a mission.

But it does mean I have a taste for the better non-alcoholic beverages. I insist on a special roast for my coffee beans, and that they are only ground moments before the coffee is made. Griffin once had my coffee tasting bad for a week, I was beginning to wonder if he was attempting to poison me, only to find that he had ground up enough coffee beans for a week and was keeping them in a tin. I gave him a lengthy explanation (a very, very lengthy one) as to why this wouldn’t do, and he has never done so again. I check regularly, whenever I am in the kitchen, making my own omelettes. A simple dish, but one that still defeats him completely.

Although he was a man of the middle-classes, I have surprisingly also had to educate him about tea, and the temperature at which the water should be added (fortunately, I have never had to remind him to warm the pot as that would have been too much, and I rather think I would have returned him from whence he came if he didn’t understand such basic necessities of life).

We had a conversation over the different kinds of boiling points, from simmering to rolling boil, and all in-between. It has made a huge difference to how he serves my pasta too (one foreign dish he took to with great aplomb and devours in heaps himself).

I should stress that I am not being either overly controlling or fussy here. I am extremely fond of peach blossom tea. Not the common orange blossom, but peach. It has the most delicate of flavours that is instantly spoiled by over boiling the leaves. It is always taken without milk which, in general, is how I take my hot beverages. It is the taste, as much as the caffeine, I want and so, for example, take black tea with lemon. I cannot abide the sweet, milky mess that Alice causes Hot Chocolate, and which I have caught her, more than once, sharing with Griffin. He, lacking the taste of a gentleman, adores it. It quite turns my stomach if I come into the room and smell its sickly scent. Very much a woman’s drink - and I think that is quite the worst thing I have ever written about Alice in these pages. However, adorable though she is, she is not perfect. Indeed, if she were, wouldn’t that be a bore!