My Dearest Marisa,
Deepest winter knows no chill like the absence of your company, and history no fool like a man who dies with precious words unspoken. I, as you know, would never suffer being remembered a fool, and so I have taken to ink to convey what soft, sweet things I have kept hidden like a knife in my cloak all these years, fearful of ever venturing afar without them close to my heart.
To my great disappointment, you already know that I have never been a man of clean morals. My efforts to keep such from you were successful on their own merit, were it not for the near-limitless resources and single-minded will of your husband-to-be. My compliments to John, really. When it comes to doing so little with so much, few men can be as boastful as he.
But I digress. I do not write these things to you so that you may know the true nature of your fiance's secret endeavors. Rather, that is not their primary aim. I write these things to you so that you may never doubt again the words I spoke to you that night in the garden. I will forever love you, and death itself cannot mar that simple and powerful truth. If I ever doubted those words myself, I feel assured I have my answer now.
I write these letters to you most of all, Marisa, because I am sure that I am dead.
It is with great regret that I realize you will no doubt have heard the news before these letters reach your hands. I wish more than anything that I could have delivered the news myself, though of course that is impossible.
A close second was to have these letters delivered by softer and cleaner hands than mine, which is of course why I selected your servant, Renardo. Would that his English were better, I might have asked him to read them. My words ferried by so dulcet a tenor as his might have somehow lessened the inevitable impact to your comfort, not to credit myself too greatly with my own importance.
It was unavoidable, I'm afraid, to have them so delayed. Your fiance's agents are especially talented in keeping the truth from you, especially where it regards my private endeavors. They would have you think me the villain and John the perennial hero, a fabrication the latter has no doubt delighted in, not knowing the face I have shown you when his arrogance leads his attentions elsewhere.
But enough. I cannot do you the disservice of wasting so long in my own ingratiation while you no doubt stare with furrowed brow at these sheets of oil-stained parchment and the carefully inked words of my confessions. I promised you truth, and so you shall have it: every moment of it unaltered, much as it pains me to lay bare the efforts I have made in darkness; shameful, if necessary, acts I had hoped in vain to hide you from.
All men, I suppose, know the feeling of an inescapable, hopeless desire. All men suffer under the weight of their own ambitions and the dreams that drive us ever onward into madness. I have never counted myself among the ranks of ordinary men, as you well know. It was that very hubris that you so deftly shattered at our every meeting. I trust that those same ever-fetching qualities, your effortless cleverness and undeniable curiosity, will now lead you to continue in spite of all misgivings.
And I am certain you will have them.
Despite the temptation to begin with your fiance's blood-filled past, I feel the part of being the better man, even in death, is to begin by placing my own life in the stocks, as it were. In truth, I feel the part of being the better man would be not to let the authorities, a mere auxiliary partner to our common duel, bring a heavy-handed and no doubt very public end to my adversary's life, but again, I digress.
I will not excuse myself with my upbringing, unpleasant though it was. You asked once of my mother, and to my credit I did not lie, but neither did I tell you the whole of the truth. My mother aided evil men in the doing of evil things, that much you know. That I did not correct you when you kindly assumed it was out of some overbearing financial pressure and the motherly desire to provide for her ailing son is only because I very much preferred your fiction to my own, unkind memories.
My mother took to the work with an acumen and an eagerness I rarely encountered in my own dealings years later. Would that there were more like her, I might have won out against our dear John, or at least been bested by a more worthy opponent. I firmly believe her willingness to act as the pleasant, legal face for the smugglers of Alverston Port was out of a personal curiosity at how long she could keep up the facade. Her little game with the port authority might have ended in her favor, had one of the local smugglers not gotten greedy. Greed, as your soon-to-be husband well knows, only ever ends with someone dead.
My father is of no consequence; a sailor with ungentlemanly notions of a proper romance spurned on by drink and the opportunity of an empty alley behind my mother's tavern. Let us discuss him no further.
In my youth, I knew a brief, idyllic existence as the apple of my mother's eye. When her affections were lost to the long string of lovers that swarmed her later years, I was beloved instead by the seldom sober patrons of the Eve's End. I relished the attention, as most children do. I suppose that early fame left its own impression on my future self, an influence you perhaps suffered under most of all.
Truthfully, I never wanted for their interest even a fraction so much as I did yours, nor had to fight for it so passionately. Drunken sailors are an easy mark for a child with deft hands and a curious mind. Neither served me well when it came to garnering your affections. There, to my great surprise, it was the clumsiest of confessions that met with the most success. I remain uncertain even now whether that describes a weakness on your part, or on mine.
To return to the point, in the months and years after my mother's murder, I quickly discovered just how much of my mother's unintentional tutelage had seeped into my mind and made itself my own. My education, however, was incomplete. Thankfully, the streets of Alverton proved an able and eager tutor; one with a ready hand always on the ruler, as it were.
I will spare you the details of my ill-spent youth; I assure you, it is not worth retelling. Every troupers' play features the delinquent urchin, the fool of a thief spared by the misplaced kindness of older, more gullible men. What the performers seldom display are the violent beatings by up-and-coming constables venting their juvenile rage on a malnourished youth of the streets caught thieving a noble's son worthy of neither his title nor his bulging purse. Perhaps because so many of their fathers would be in the audience, enjoying the show.
No, the story I wish to tell you begins long after my teenage years, during which my cleverness so often saw me into and out of troublesome situations of a life-threatening nature; a far cry from my later years, to be sure. It begins instead the day that we met, so unassumingly one fine August afternoon under a sudden and unseasonable storm that chased all others from the streets of Ottsburg proper, leaving you and I alone to brave the winds and rain; a day when we both went in search of a way back from the brink our respective lives had drawn us to and instead found each other so appropriately on the apex of the precarious bridge over Fulton Creek.
It was on that day that, for the first and best time, I fell in love. Had I known then that I had only just signed my death warrant, I would not for a moment have thought better of walking up and introducing myself. On the contrary, I think I might have been all the bolder. I would apologize for keeping the coward's way for so many years at your side, never telling you in so many words how I felt, but I know too well the ends that await those men who chase their hopeless desires down dark streets in the rain. It was a life I could not suffer myself to bring to you until now, when I have at last, in my dying, made it safe.
This is the truth I have kept from you out of love, with a dedication heretofore unknown to me. This is the truth of your fiance, my friend and adversary, and of the world that I suspect you always knew was there, waiting in the shadows around my every word. I will draw back the curtain on the veil of lies John and I have told you all these years, and let you judge us both in full light of the sun.
I only hope, in the end, that whatever part of your heart remains unbroken in the reading of these letters may yet have some room for a kinder memory of me than I by all rights deserve. But then, as I have said: I know too well the hopeless desires that afflict all men.
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