I have already said earlier in this journal how much I liked the man Titus Perry. In better circumstances I would have been proud to call him a friend. But then, in better circumstances Abby, you would have been known to me as a daughter should, and I to you as a father, so we both know that things cannot always be as we would wish them.

When we work for a greater good we walk a fine line between aiding and betraying those we love. Sometimes the former will wear the guise of the latter, and as such will it be recognised and remembered. But for me there was no equivocation. I crossed that line and willingly, and I must now live with the consequences of my actions. You see, betrayal to me was not how you, or most of Christendom, would construe it. To me it was the inevitable act of transformation whereby my work reached its point, and my ambitions their conclusion. Much as the alchemist might invoke a potion to transmute an element, or even as a baker must add yeast should he wish a Christian loaf, so to me was betrayal merely that agency whose use enabled my own article reach maturation. The article I strove to attain was a future in which we most of us might benefit, and if that required the betrayal of a lesser concept, or even a man, then so be it. Never did I wish him ill or that harm befell him, I swear dearest Abby, but I did my damndest to ensure that it did. Does that sound strange? Then picture a broken limb upon which the application of a splint causes excruciating agony, but without which it cannot recover. It grieves you sorely to be the one who must apply it, but you do it in the knowledge that you are thereby aiding the one you nurse.

Such was the grief I felt when I saw that the inevitable at last had come to pass, when the trends we had noted became more than that, and the purpose behind them became manifest. Others, with baser motives and agendas, were setting into train a sequence of events that forced our hand. The time had come to move ourselves. And in the cataclysm that we knew we were precipitating, it was more than friendship and familial duty that would be sacrificed to the greater good I spoke of. I confess that I put that grief to one side, subdued my doubts, and persevered in the execution of what I then considered my duty.

In those days, you see, I believed that life was as a series of tides, and that one man alone had as much influence over them as Canute of old proved to his kinsmen. I was to learn later how untrue this belief was. If life is a series, it is of accidents and coincidences, and to ascribe a rationale to these events is a folly of philosophers and men in their cups. They appear as a tide because they are inexorable, and the cleverest and most ambitious men can indeed predict their occurrence and avoid them, or even claim in retrospect to have caused them. But I was not so clever. I used a misplaced faith in patterns and their reasons therefore to justify my failure in halting the progress of events that carried me towards an inevitable pass.

There is not a person in Christendom who will fail to tell you that Judas Iscariot had an evil heart. But at that moment Abby I felt compassion for the man. His role in his story was written for him by the very man he betrayed, and in his own mind in any case he felt that his act of betrayal could only be to the ultimate benefit of his God. I did not even have his belief in his own righteousness to fall back on. All I had was the notion that I was being carried with a current that made my actions at least unavoidable, if not justifiable.

I pray God you believe my words Abby. The truth is so often hidden completely behind fact …