The Final Confession of Damian Spector

So the Renaissance Festival is going very well this season. The first weekend was great. The character I've created is Lord High Sheriff Damian Spector, who I've engendered to be a cartoonish, mustache-twirling, villain. However, in my experience even a character played broadly for comedy needs some grounding in reality. Early on in the rehearsal period we were asked to write a letter detailing a memory our characters might have of a seminal point in their lives. I was going to write about how Damian's father, Severus Spector (a tax collector from Shropshire) turned his mother, Isabella over to the authorities for being a recusant Catholic and then made him watch as she was burned to death. But then I came up with this little memory...

~The Final Confession of Lord High Sheriff Damian Spector~
~Chief Constable of Warwick Town~
Writ on this thirty first day of October in the year of our Lord fifteen hundred and eighty eight; Anno Domini

Journeyman adventurer, thou who hast unearthed this parchment, list well to my tale of woe...

Whilst I was still young and guileless and the bloom of youth still stained my cheeks like a ripe, red, apple, I was o'er taken by a foul mania. Aye, the all too common affliction known to fops and fools alike as... "Love..." To be sure, an insidious malady that strikes down beggar and King, reducing an otherwise lucid man to an artless, dizzy-eyed, clotpole. I damn my eyes for this foul weakness which o'er came me; this shadow, this blight; hanging o'er my head like the sword of Damocles... This putrid sickness which gnawed at my guts like filthy rats fighting o'er discarded meat at an abattoir.

Cordelia was her name. When our eyes first locked I was but ten and four and she ten and six. Her tresses were spun copper hanging in ringlets about her perfect countenance. Her diminutive chin a flawless fit for my thumb and forefinger. And the orbs... Deep emerald eyes that looked through me. Into me. Verdant like the pitiless, wine-dark, seas. Under her steady gaze I was unmanned... Stripped bare... All pretence burned away...

We wed the next autumn 'gainst the wishes of mine own sire. I was the son of a landed gentleman. She a simple farmer's daughter. Father beat me near to my grave. I took the licks with nary a word. Love controlled me. More the fool I. To marry for love rather than gain... Tis insanity...

Time passed as it is want to do. For lack of a better term, I was... "Content." Mayhaps e'en "happy." An odd sensation that I recall now only with bile in the back of my throat. I had become a soldier to support my young bride. I was in Flanders in the low countries fighting the Spanish scourge for Queen and country under William of Orange when word did reach mine ears like an ill wind. My wife... My Cordelia with the iron-red hair and the dancing damnable eyes had perished in the eighth moon of her confinement whilst birthing our child... And not e'en a son at that! Better the All Mighty to deliver unto me a stillborn than a daughter. A witless girl who looked at me with her dead mother's eyes. Fie!

God was to blame. Was it not the Creator who had infected my soul with his insidious love? Was it not Jehovah who then took from me that one joyous possession? The one being in the world entire that made my black existence bearable. My wife. My life.
My Ragnarok.

The scales are out of balance. It is my estimation that God doth owe me. Since I can not take my rightful vengeance on the All Mighty, I shall seek retaliation 'gainst all his creation. This did I vow on the night I learned my wife was struck dead by God. I shall have my pound of flesh from where I will. The suffering I inflict shall be legion. Now cruelty is my joy. I laugh in the face of the carnage I inflict. And when the day doth come to face my maker, let it be he who must beware!