A Most Unwelcome Imagination
Aurelia Danby was born to be ridiculous.
It was largely due to her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Danby, who were notable fools among the aristocracy. The duke was a prince with no meaningful way to the throne, and his wife was as spoiled and lovely as he. They lived for parties and pretty things and wanted for nothing but sensibility, self-awareness, and maturity.
Naturally, with a life so full of decadence and friends who encouraged their worst faults and fantasies, the responsibility of raising a child was spectacularly lost on them.
In Aurelia’s first few minutes of life, her mother announced to those attending her, “She’s as lovely a babe as any other.” The midwives cooed as though it were the most flattering thing they’d ever heard a mother say. Then the duchess handed the baby off and attended a party. It was the last time she ever held her daughter, but Aurelia didn’t mind because her wet nurse was much warmer in both disposition and temperature.
It should be noted that fault for Aurelia’s foolishness might be shared with the nursemaids the Danbys paid to keep their daughter happy, but the staff only did their best. They sang songs and offered hugs, minded her through her first steps, and taught her letters and numbers as well as how to curtsy and say thank you. And they filled her head with love stories and fairy tales to show her that lovely things could happen to girls with no parents.
Aurelia quickly learned to love the extensive library that took up an entire wall of her nursery. Thick tomes with hand-painted illustrations provided her endless tales of lords and ladies and beautiful fairy princesses, and she clung to their stories as surely as she did her favorite toys.
If zealots and monks had scripture and prayer, Aurelia lived for games and legends. And the staff indulged her every whim because they loved and pitied her.
Despite her pretty, unproblematic life, her parents eventually decided having a child was no longer in vogue. So upon Aurelia’s seventh birthday, the duke and duchess shipped her off to live with her great aunt, Lady Clara Wedderburn—a wealthy old grouch with no children of her own.
Lady Wedderburn was a large woman who wore dresses that might have suited her decades earlier, but now only gave the impression that she lived under a mound of moldy gray chiffon. It didn’t matter, however, as she had no one she cared to impress. She’d inherited money instead of marrying into it and lived reclusively in a country manor dripping with vines and shadows and occupied by servants who ambled rather than rushed.
During her first days on the estate, Aurelia comforted herself with stories that proved lovely things could also happen to girls who lived with old hags. Each night, she laid awake long after the household went to bed, memorizing pictures of heroes and monsters, and she rose early every morning to do exactly the same. She only needed her books to be happy, and her only concern was that she may eventually require more.
Aunt Clara didn’t mind Aurelia as long as she stayed quiet and out of the way. Aurelia didn’t mind Aunt Clara either, so long as she wasn’t squawking about the sorts of things old ladies squawked about—like fraying hems and tired servants.
Aurelia often escaped to the garden where her aunt would not follow, since the old woman was very much like a vampire in that she enjoyed shadows and hissed at the sun. There among trees and thorns and leafy bushes, Aurelia was an explorer seeking adventure or a soldier patrolling the plants, keeping the budding flowers safe from thieves and bandits who feared her tenacity and wit. She cracked trolls’ riddles and sent them scrambling into garden sheds and overturned buckets. Though the staff never engaged with Aurelia’s daydreams, she frequently caught the gardeners peeking at her over the hedges with kind smiles, and she would grin back despite her missing teeth testifying to her passing childhood.
When she tired of the gardens, she ventured into the forest behind the house. It quickly became her favorite place where she often fled with one of her fairytale books tucked under her arm. Beyond the trees was a lake, which Aurelia found exceptionally lovely on sunny days. She liked to sit on the seawall and wait for mermaids to appear from the muddy depths. Of course, she never saw any, but she held out hope that one day they would come say hello and offer her a glimmering tail so she could follow them to treasure chests and shipwrecks.
She was both damsel and knight—quiet or boisterous when it suited her—and she was always careful of her hem so Aunt Clara could have nothing to shame her for.
But as per usual in England, rain often overtook the estate and forced Aurelia inside. She didn’t mind the rain, but everyone claimed she’d catch her death were she to venture into it. This inspired another fun game—chasing Death through the house so she might convince him to vanquish her enemies. And when her giggling became too much for her aunt, Aurelia found as much satisfaction returning to her books and plotting her next adventure.
As fall came, and then winter, Aurelia spent cold, dreary days wandering the empty halls. She lost herself in new, unfamiliar parts of the house, where she’d become a beautiful damsel running from invisible minotaurs or escaping a secret lair, inspired by whatever tale she’d fed her imagination the night before. She’d scamper through winding corridors to her room, her spine tingling as she hunkered in the safety of the colorless bedding and ugly furniture designed for tastes much older and finer than her own.
When she knew the house too well to get lost, she became a princess in a beautiful castle, dancing through invisible balls with imaginary knights and princes who were enraptured by her beauty. Meanwhile, books lay strewn about her room in careless, shifting piles she organized by whichever had her favorite pictures.
But gloomy weather and indifferent staff had tremendous power to occasionally dispirit a girl. Despite her lovely pictures and imaginary friends and foes, Aurelia began to acquaint herself with loneliness. On days like these—and there were many—she drifted down long halls as the only ghost in Aunt Clara’s home, aching for someone to haunt.
As the years passed and her age crept above ten years old, the piles of books in her room shifted to prioritize stories of escape, and her dreaming followed suit. Suddenly, Aurelia was a fugitive, escaping through the forest behind the house to stand on the lake shore, looking for the ship on which her prince would reside, coming to take her away to new worlds full of new people and adventures.
Yearning made Aurelia reckless. Aunt Clara grew shorter in patience and was ready with harsh exclamations of what nonsense or ridiculous child every time she caught her niece chasing her imagination with her blonde hair coming undone from the fine up-dos a maid spent half an hour perfecting each day. And when Aurelia was forced into stillness by Aunt Clara’s orders, she slipped her nose into a book to fill her head with more impossible things.
But devastation proved to come for rich, pretty girls as surely as it did for those who were not so fortunate as Aurelia. When she turned twelve, her books disappeared. They vanished from her room and the library as though they’d never existed.
Aurelia approached her aunt, weeping like it was her only salvation, but Aunt Clara simply declared from behind a newspaper, “Don’t be ridiculous, dear. The only appropriate books for a young woman are history, philosophy, and the Bible.” She flipped the paper down to study Aurelia’s streaky red face and swollen gray eyes. “It’s time to abandon silly pursuits. You’ll be a proper young woman with the best education money can buy, and one day you’ll do your family proud and marry a fine, lofty man.”
Aurelia had thrown herself to the floor, wailing and flailing, her heart torn wide open as her entire world was ripped away.
After that, her hems lowered and her clothes changed to new styles fit for a young woman. Aurelia rarely ventured outside due to the endless parade of tutors and instructors for everything from math and science—which she hated—to music and dance, which she did like, while her precious tales were hidden in a trunk in a drafty attic she couldn’t get into, no matter how many knives she broke in the lock.
Nevertheless, her stories lingered in the back of her mind, begging for her attention so fiercely that her toes itched in her new shoes. So desperate she became for something interesting to think about that she took to stealing the daily newspaper after Aunt Clara skimmed the headlines at breakfast and tsked at how far England has fallen for its politics, celebrities, fashions, and whatever else reminded her of her advancing age.
But for all the things Aunt Clara hated, Aurelia found wonder and intrigue in the latest scandals. Here she found her first silver lining, for had her books not been taken, she might never have discovered the pirates.
The papers spoke of terrible men who robbed and pillaged and terrorized on land and at sea. The crown didn’t mind so much when the streets ran with pilfered Spanish gold from the Americas, but they loathed piracy in their own port cities and executed the perpetrators in grand, graphic events that made Aurelia’s stomach turn.
So fascinating were they that she sought to know more about the kind of life that deserved such fierce ends. She read of all the crews dominating the Atlantic, but no one was more famous or fearsome than the dreaded Captain Robert Copson and his ship, the Fortuna Royale, which was said to carry at least forty cannons. Aurelia wasn’t sure if forty cannons was an incredible number of guns, but the papers spoke like it was, so she responded in kind with awe.
Captain Copson was an enigma who made as much money for the papers as he did by robbing ships. He was said to have sailed for nearly ninety years, but those who reported meeting him in the Caribbean or West Indies said he was young and handsome. And those who claimed to have sailed with him said he’d drunk from the Fountain of Youth and was therefore immortal. Nestled among reports of witches and sea monsters, the story didn’t seem far-fetched.
He ruled the seas, robbing the Spanish, French, and English alike, and sailing wherever and taking whatever suited him. He killed entire crews for their ships and sailed with a fleet of loyal men, striking fear into all—pirates, sailors, civilians, kings; it didn’t seem to matter so long as they made him rich.
Aurelia wasn’t sensible enough to be disgusted or horrified. In fact, she loved the articles so much that she’d carefully clip each story and hide them in the pages of a philosophy book she hid beneath her mattress.
All the while, she pretended to read things Aunt Clara might find more palatable, but kings and politicians never did anything so interesting as raiding ships and drinking from immortal waters, and while she skimmed the pages, she only saw colorful skies, pirate ships, and piles of gold.
Despite every attempt to correct her, Aurelia Danby was ridiculous, and everyone told her so—from her aunt to the staff to her tutors.
But if people like Captain Copson existed, she saw no good reason to stop.