To Whoever Finds This Book

Love is bitter and love is sweet, but more bitter than sweet, and a nearer cousin to grief than to pleasure.

These are my very words. I wrote them once, years ago, in a play never performed, never even finished. I should have carved them on my heart.

Sour grapes, think you?

Truth, rather, friend. The voice of experience, which does speak more loudly than Seneca or Socrates or whatever other cob-webbed philosopher please you. Ask the man and not the mantle. By Mary's blessed son, he'll tell you the same.

But I write not of generals, rather of particulars. Which brings me to this book, a book I write as much for penance's sake as for monument to her whom I once loved and whose death I caused. Not because I murdered her, but because I bred—without intention—madness and treachery and, yes, murder, too.

A conundrum, you say? A mystery?

So it was, a mystery to me as well as to others. My penance is this memoir, nothing extenuating, nothing concealed, every jot and tittle of the broken law laid bare before your eyes that you may judge how I did acquit myself, for what reasons and in what peril to myself and to my friends.

Therefore, friend, when you find these yellowed papers in time to come, secreted behind plastered wall or buried deep in well or cave, pray do not cast them off or use these mortal pages to feed some ravenous fire. I promise you they will not warm but chill the blood with something novel, something strange. My repentance will not serve me unless I confess at least to one other soul. Talk not to me of confessor or of priest. I've had my fill of them; that's not my church that dispenses grace for mere recitals of a rosary or a farthing for the poor box. Give me, rather, one honest reader, practiced in the art, alert to follow plot and read between these lines the agony of a troubled heart.

Let it be you, friend. Let it be you.