What are you before you’re born? I ask myself that question, and there is no answer. But is there something in you, even as a seed before birth, that might someday catch fire depending on the circumstances? Something that might, once begun, become a driving need in a person as much as the need for food and water? I suppose, Matthew, that I am touching on facets of good and evil that no one can fully understand.

Am I evil?

I’ll let you decide.

I was given up as a baby to an orphanage in Spitalfields, so perhaps it was only natural that I return there. I did not know my mother or father. I received my name of Elizabeth from the first woman who found me wrapped in a blanket in their barn. I simply recall growing up in the orphanage, surrounded by the others and with kindly people there to assist us. The games of children. I remember them well, and I think that was a happy time.

At the age of eight I was adopted by an older woman—she was in her late forties—and taken with her to the boarding house she ran in Walham Green, southwest of the city. Her name was Nora Mulloy, a widow of a few years, whose daughter by blood had married a tobacco merchant and moved with him to the colonies. I was to call her ‘Mum’, and I was pleased to do so.

Yes, Matthew, I did know love at one time in my life. And that was a wonderful time. The boarding house was kept spotlessly clean, my mum was a grand cook famous in the area for her soups and chowders, and we had quite a good business due to those qualities and the fact that our house stood near Sand’s End and the harbor there, so we had many travellers passing through.

In her youth Mum had been a street dancer with a group of other girls. She had never lost her flair. She always dressed well and wore an assortment of gloves such as those I have on now, and those I always wear. She taught me how to dance, how to express myself with the movements of legs, arms, head and hands. It was quite a gift she had. How flawlessly she could move, how effortlessly … but I can tell you that learning it takes a great deal of effort. She said I was born to the dance. In time I put on little shows for some of the boarders, with her playing the flute and sometimes the drum. The next year she proclaimed me ready for the public, as she called it, and she sent me out to dance at the harbor and give out broadsheets advertising our house. Oh, it was a harmless thing, Matthew … she always accompanied me and it was all good business … but how were she and I to know what it would soon attract?