In Which Friendship Is Made, And Perhaps More

Nicholas Rafe to Jem Tarpley:

There are a few things I could say I require, but the first is a favor: do stop calling me Master Rafe. I am no man’s master any more than I am any man’s servant; I do not walk humbly before my king, and I do not accept humility from my valet. I find mastery and servitude to be abominations among human beings of free will, so you may call me Nick or Rafe or Bumberscullion or however you choose to think of me – anything but the sterile hiss of “Master.”

Other than that, a book or two would be gratefully received, and perhaps some jam to my bread. If it will run to a chicken leg or some other meat or cheese, my cup would be full. Or if you cared to be more literal in the matter of full cups, I would almost sell my honor for a full cup of decent wine, but only if it would not cause you any trouble.

Have no fear that your kindness in this matter will do anything to stop our correspondence – on the contrary, I would cheerfully give up the books, the wine, the jam on the bread, even the bread itself or the poor clothes that remain to me in order to keep the lifeline of your letters. You are kind enough to say that I have been a means of change in you; well, you have changed me in your turn. I have known many people in my time: men and women, high and low, of every type and quality; I have many good friends and there are many who would risk themselves for my life and happiness. But I have never met – I would never have assumed there existed – such a friend among enemies, who would reach out his hand as you have done at the risk of your own personal safety and without ever having exchanged a word with me, in spite of my affront to your patriotism. I was wrong to call you cynical, young Tarpley; only a man of faith could take such a step for the sake of nothing but our shared humanity.

Damn it! How I loathe this miserable dungeon: the darkness blinding me from seeing more than your face, the door barring me from clasping your hand, the walls enclosing me from the sound of your voice. I pretend that I know you, but your life began for me two weeks ago in the torture chamber where I found you and lost my hand. Where did you spring from; how did you become who you are? I burn to know.

I am a brute to howl at you like this – please don’t be put off. If you put a rare dish before a starving man he snatches at it; that is all.

Yours. Truly.
Nicholas Rafe

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Jem Tarpley to Nicholas Rafe:

Nicholas,

You see I’ve decided on Nicholas. It doesn’t describe how I think of you, but if I called you by the words by which I think of you it would seem stilted to both of us. I hope you don’t regret this familiarity – there’s nothing special about me, but I know you are hungry for companionship so I’ve made myself bold. If I’d met you anywhere else I would stand shyly in the corner and you wouldn’t notice me in the first place.

My life story is rather a poor one, and not particularly worthy of your interest. I have no family or home, no particular friends and no future that I can see. I am an orphan; my mother was a barmaid; I never knew my father. I had no trade and no money to apprentice, but there is always a berth for a fighting man in Marshweather. I was carrying water in the border skirmishes when I was fifteen, but I have never liked the communal life of the army, and while the prison is unpleasant, at least there is solitude. It never occurred to me to regret the solitude until you came.

Yours,
Jem Tarpley

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Nicholas Rafe to Jem Tarpley:

You aggravating youth,

That meager outline you give of your life till now is worse than a left-handed sketch of a masterpiece, damn your enigmatic eyes. As though a humble upbringing and a career in arms is the whole of you! A paragraph to cover twenty-odd years of a man’s life! Years in which you managed to become lettered, as a scholar would and not a soldier – how did you? In which you left your mother and home – but why? In which you learned to shun communal life, and prefer solitude – what did you discover in yourself that made humanity more easily preserved in a prison than in a barrack?

Your outward circumstances I could imagine for myself in an afternoon of daydreaming – and I have, over and over. It is your inner life that haunts me: that in you which expresses yourself in the written word with more facility than most soldiers do in the spoken; that which prizes love, honor and courage more than duty, obligation and fear; that which preserved humanity and pity even in the torture chamber with your hands on the throat of your country’s enemy.

Write to me, I beg of you, not of the events that have shaped your life, but of how your life has shaped your soul, and of your aspirations for the future and your growth as a man. I have passed through the stage of believing that I know you and into the stage where I simply must know you. I cannot touch you; I can barely see you – so the only way I can know you is through your letters.

Yours,
Nicholas Rafe

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