From Fitzroy's Private Diary (Extract 140)

I’m an old school spy. I come from an era when spycraft entailed intense action. This could be anything from being on the wrong end of someone else’s knife to finding myself in a lady’s bedchamber (and, on the rarest of occasions, both at the same time). I’ve fallen off things, through things, and even been shot. In the field, I had to be entirely self-reliant, using nothing but my wits and my guile to survive and get the job done.

Modern spying is an entirely different endeavour. For one thing, there are so many more spies now. You can barely move in Whitehall without bumping into crowds of them, analysing, planning, and concocting the most outlandish schemes. Now it’s all about watching and waiting, passing information up the chain of command, and waiting patiently to hear back.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully support the process of gathering intelligence, as rash and foolhardy action is more than likely to fail, but with a powerful enemy like Hitler’s Germany, it’s imperative that we act. We need to keep the enemy on their toes, seeking out weaknesses so we can impose surgical strikes. If we do our job properly, one of those will eventually be the killing blow.

So why is it that every time I ask my goddaughter to undertake a mission, she comes back with yet more injuries? I give her important work as a testament to her skills and talents, but I also give her work that’s unlikely to lead her into direct action (her mother would see me dead several times over if I deliberately put her in harm’s way).

I realise we must all do our bit, and my shielding of Hope is minimal, so I use her where I feel she can best achieve results. However, does she report back to me as frequently as I’d like? No, she does not. She’ll watch and wait, as instructed, then dive headlong into peril, coming out bloodied (I loathe to admit this, but her approach is usually quite successful).

Fortunately, Alice has enough security clearance that she can read the reports, and therefore does not entirely blame me for her daughter’s recklessness. However, it cannot be ignored that I conducted most of her training. I’d thought her a quiet, observant, and highly intelligent girl. She’s all that, of course, but now that I’ve let her off the leash, she’s proving to be something of a termagant, playing the long game one moment then exploding into action the next.

It’s almost as if she combines the very worst of her mother and me. Oh, hell.