Earth's crammed with heaven,
 and every common bush afire with God,
but only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

~ Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

There are many reasons for which I have long wanted to write an account of mine and A.J. Raffles' life together; because being a newly released ex-convict I have little money and fewer prospects outside of writing; because A. J. always enjoyed the idea of immortalised infamy; because they are good stories, and good stories ought always to be heard; and because in writing episodes of our past life, I can through memory relive them and, for a while, be with him again. But I also want these stories published because I feel the need to set the record straight as regards the character and personality of A. J. Raffles. Since our arrest, my conviction, and Raffles' condemnation in absentia, it seems the whole world has an opinion to voice on the manner of man my friend, my partner, my hero and my villain was; and as is so often the case with such things, everyone is getting it all wrong.

Some have him down as malicious, violent, and degenerate. Others as manipulative, conniving, and evil. More still are painting him as little more than a common crook, whose sporting prowess opened the door to a polite society of which he ought never to have been a part, our criminal success owing far more to the naive and good-hearted trust of our marks than to any ingenuity or skill. Any of Raffles' positive attributes, of which he had many that were subtle and many more still that were patently undeniable even to his most virulent of detractors, those virtues of his that would be lauded in another are now marked down in him as frauds, as fallacies, as little more than further blinds to dazzle and confuse his victims and enemies into trusting a man so obviously untrustworthy to his core. All that was good in him is erased, and all that was bad magnified tenfold. Even those who had known Raffles personally, did not know Raffles personally. It's all too easy for his charisma, his charm, his dazzling wit to in retrospect be corrupted; all of those things for which our fairweather friends had so adored him, are turned now to ammunition to be used against him.

And I, too, have been egregiously misrepresented; though never so much so as Raffles, for his fame mutated to the blackest of infamies. Just as I shone only with his reflected light when all the world held him in favour, so now I only fade into his shadows as he is cast into darkness. I am, so every man in the street would have you believe, the insignificant Bunny Manders; the weak; the fool; the easily led; the nobody who did nothing but have the poor luck to stumble into the path of Raffles' oncoming train. The unfortunate wretch carried away by a blackguard's stronger will, and with no more choice or personal agency than a barrel going over a waterfall. Some have gone so far as to claim I was innocent of all wrong-doing, heaping all of my guilt and all of my sins onto the broad shoulders of the best and truest friend I ever had.

In essence, the world has made two-dimensional caricatures of the both of us; he the Machiavellian villain with nary a scruple, moral, nor finer feeling in his heart, and I the pitiable sidekick with the wit of a lion, the courage of a lamb, and about the same moral culpability of a beaten dog still trailing loyally behind its sinful master. I can't deny that I have allowed this to anger and upset me. But I have come to realise - and the isolation of the prison cell is a wonderful place for such realisations - that people are stupid. It's easier to reduce the world down to basics; good and bad, right and wrong, kind and cruel, hero and villain; and so that's what they do. It takes much too much long, hard, serious thought to acknowledge, accept and understand life for all of its complicated, tangled, and contradictory magnificence; and it takes far too much effort for them to see A.J. for all of his complicated, tangled and contradictory magnificence. And how could they, when all that they know of the man I so loved is that which they read in newspapers, or hear on the street? How could they, when that is all they want to see?

And all of this is why I want to write about him; to add colour to the black and white newspaper sketches which so poorly represent him; to complicate the shallow and simplistic beliefs which so many have come to hold. I want the world to see the Raffles that I saw, to know the Raffles that I knew - not merely for accuracy's sake, nor for pride's alone; but because A.J. Raffles was magnificent. He was one in a million. Artist, and sportsman, and gentleman, and genius, villain, and hero, and visionary. To allow such an extraordinary portrait to become so corrupted, and twisted, and grotesque is to do a disservice to the world as well as to him; but some people would rather smash the Grecian urn for being obscure than seek to understand its beauty.

Raffles saw the world differently. Where others would see only one path, Raffles could see one hundred; for every missed shot, he could fire a thousand more. His mind was like lightning bottled, his heart as soft and as sure as gold, his sight as clear and as limitless as a cloudless night sky. When Raffles let you in, when he held open the door to his world and invited you to step through, suddenly you realised just how closed off, how closed minded, how thoroughly blindfolded to everything you had always been. A.J. could see the potential in everything, the artistry in everything, heaven crammed into every inch of the earth - and hell, too. Whilst the rest of the world was underwater, muted, drowning, and swept along with the tide, Raffles was on fire - dangerous and enticing and vibrant and so very alive . To him, every bush was burning, and nothing was merely of itself. Raffles never needed a voice of God to tell him right from wrong, never condescended to remove his sandals at the temple gates - his shoes were already off in reverence to a world filled to overbrimming with beauty, and poetry, and opportunity rife for those willing to take the risk of grasping for it.

Perhaps it is naive of me to hope that society might one day see A.J. as I do; perhaps it is unjustifiable hubris on my part to think that my paltry, lacking writings might turn the tide so set against him. And perhaps ultimately it is a Sisyphean task, akin to explaining the wonders of Spring to a bird pecking at a sprouting flower, or the vastness of the cosmos to a moth consumed by candle's flame. Even I, who knew him so well, who knew him better than any person living, even I could never know his deepest depths or his highest heights; could never hope to map all of the myriad labyrinthine paths which led to the heart of the man. I am not so much a fool as people believe me to be. I don't hope for the world to see A.J. Raffles for all that he was, only to see that there is more to be seen; only to understand that for every villainous act, there was a virtuous one, and that sometimes the two overlapped so much as to be indistinguishable; only that the easy answers rarely speak the truth. I only want the world to see that Raffles, my Raffles, was not some trickster god, arrogant and capricious and foiled by his own hubris; but that he was a Daedalus, reaching for the sun.