Foreword

I AM A LOVE CHILD, born in the year 1810, and a love child I would be for ever. You see, once you’re a love child, you can never be anything else in this unforgiving world. I know not why this is so – why a child born to parents who aren’t married to one another should be treated unfairly. But I don’t care one jot what people say about me.

Yes, yes – it’s true that I wasn’t just a love child. I had the great misfortune to be an abandoned love child, one that had been cast off into a foundling turnbox wheel, yet survive I did. In my childish heart I consoled myself, believing my real parents to be the most perfect people, and it became my secret wish to find them.

A small child I was at the time, with magical powers where I could make things right again whenever my enchanted world got tangled up in misery and sorrow or whenever the all-knowing grown-ups didn’t make any sense. Oh, to believe in that child again! And now, here I am, seven years wiser, bereft of my magical powers, trying to make sense of it all – of this thing, this really big thing that happened to me in 1815, when I found my parents and then I lost my parents.