"I grew up in London many years before you, your parents, or even your great grandparents were born. Life was hard in those days, but my father, a skilled and renowned tailor, provided well for his family. My sister and I were educated and never went wanting. Our home was small, but always filled with love and laughter. "Then the plague came. "My sister caught it first. I remember seeing her lying there - my beloved Anne - delirious and unable to speak, her bedsheets soaked with sweat and blood. Our parents felt helpless and afraid. They didn't know what to do, nobody did. All we could do was make her comfortable, and watch in vain as the illness took her life. "And then it took my parents. It's difficult to describe the sense of dark inevitability a child feels while she's watching her parents die. There they are, your mother and father, who have fed you and provided for you and cared for you your entire life, and now they are completely dependent upon on you, their mortality hanging by a thread. It was a cruel disease. It killed quickly, but painfully, and it left many orphans. "Like a tornado that destroys one house but leaves those around it standing, the plague never took root in my body; but still I was not free of its merciless grip. I made friend after friend at the orphanage that became my home, and then watched as friend after friend died. Determined not to just sit idle as all those I cared about perished, I began to study the medical arts. I spoke to dozens of doctors and nursing staff, quizzing and probing for every fragment of knowledge they possessed. Some were impressed with my eagerness to learn and allowed me to spend time in their surgery, reading text books and journals. Others were less impressed, treating me with impatience and even, at times, contempt, especially after I began to embrace Eastern medicines and the Wiccan arts. "Yet still, those around me were dying. "It's difficult not to feel overwhelmed with despair when you are surrounded by hopelessness and death. Sometimes I would sit on the steps of the orphanage and daydream of a far away land, untouched by sickness, filled with warmth and light and clean, untainted air. It was, of course, Sarodor. "So when one day Mother Sinistra came to me and offered the life I'd been dreaming of, my acceptance was immediate and without question."