I.
Aurora wasn’t old enough to remember the first time she became an orphan, but she remembered the second.
Alongside thousands of other Londoners, nine-year old Aurora—who had not yet given herself that name—sat under an umbrella at the Crystal Palace. As the crowd gathered on a hill, waiting for the grand event to begin, Aurora nibbled on a stick of rock candy.
For only a shilling, the rich and the poor, but not too poor, were invited to wander the grand fairgrounds built to celebrate the English spirt of 1872. One could view paintings of chieftains and sculptures of dinosaurs, or buy ceramics and glassware before taking in a tragic opera about Sir Walter Scott. If your tastes skewed younger, there were marionettes of Little Bo-peep and Froggy went-a-wooing, followed by the distributi
