This sylvan retreat seemed made for a meeting of naiads and nereids. In short, the spot was so sheltered, the outlook over sea and land both near and across the strait so fair, that one could well believe even Pliny’s famed Tuscan garden, which may have suggested some features of this British one, was not more happily placed.
When Ælius had come, some eighteen years before the beginning of our story, to take up his command on the coast of Britain, he had brought with him his young wife. This lady, always delicate in health, had not long survived her transplantation to a northern climate. Six months after her arrival in Britain she had died in giving birth to a daughter. The child was entrusted to the care of a British woman, wife of the sailing master of one of the Roman ships, who had reared her together with her own daughter. When little Ælia was but a few weeks old her foster-mother had become a widow, her husband having met with his death in a desperate encounter with one of the Saxon cruisers. This misfortune had been followed by another, the loss of her two elder children, who had been carried off by a malarious fever. The widow, thus doubly bereaved, had thankfully accepted the Count’s offer that she should take the post of mother of the maids in his household. Her foster-daughter, a feeble little thing, whom she had the greatest difficulty in rearing, was as dear to her as was her own child, and the new arrangement ensured that she should not be separated from her. For ten years she was as happy as a woman who had lost so much could hope to be. She had the pleasure of seeing her delicate nursling pass safely through childhood, and grow into a handsome, vigorous girl. Then her own call came; and feeling that her earthly work was done, she had been glad to meet it. The Count, who was a frequent visitor to her deathbed, had no difficulty in promising her that the two children should never be separated. Indeed he could not have divided the pair even had he wished. Every wish of the ten-year-old Ælia was as a law to him, and Ælia would have simply broken her heart to lose her playmate and sister Carna.