I am Nora Barnet, forty-six years old, and a grandmother. Oh gosh, that feels so weird to say. Putting that aside, it has been a while, hasn’t it?

Let me start where we began: my first year at King Rupert’s Preparatory School. When I look back now, that year is very much the defining period of my life. Most of the values and beliefs I hold to this day were formed during that time. Of course, most of my closest friends were there as well, staying in contact all these years.

The second year, then, helped me refine and cement who I wanted to be. A fun year. Where to start…. A pleasant surprise, Trissy joined the embroidery club. While clumsy at first, she was rather diligent and became competent enough to help me with the last couple of dresses I made that year. Aside from that, it also gave her many opportunities to see Evan and, well, she became Lady Sussex not long after her debut. They had two sons, and keep the older son, James, in mind for later.

Back to school for the moment, Trissy’s involvement with the club meant I got to know Lady Wye (she has since married, but I’ll use old surnames for convenience) fairly well as she would drop in now and then. Rebecca is her first name and she is still annoyed when I call her Becky in private. Lady Ashford (Judith, though I call her Judy) also made many appearances at the club or in the dormitory’s lounge. As I got used to dealing with her, we became frenemies, her pride too great to admit anything while I enjoy teasing her.

Similarly, I became better acquainted with the other ladies of my year. None I would call friends in the same way as Violet or Trissy, but we could have little chats, and I received invitations when the social season started. I sometimes hear from Lady Challock, but she is rather busy; usually, Violet tells me how she is as they work together on occasion.

What else of that year…. Oh, Violet’s silk scarf. I had to wait a week into the summer holidays to hand it to her, but she of course loved it, and it has since become her trademark in the Chamber of Lords. (I’ll finish catching you up with Violet just now.)

Iris didn’t waste that summer, sewing me her own rendition of an iris and snowdrop on a handkerchief. I treasure it alongside the one from Evan. Oh, yes, for my birthday that year, it turns out Evan had been using the club time to sew a snowdrop onto a handkerchief. I happily accepted it, very much an acceptable present this time.

Back to Iris. Although she traded the handkerchief for the dress, I didn’t get to see her wear it until her wedding—that really took me by surprise. It must have been quite the sight for the guests, me crying just as much as Terri and Rose.

I guess, since I’m talking about her, I might as well go all the way. So, a year or two after I graduated, she had a go at starting her own business—a café aimed at a more upper-class clientele—but failed to secure funding. An unmarried woman really didn’t have much of a chance. Still, she kept trying and eventually found employment at a restaurant that catered to the top end of the middle-class, building up her skills.

A short interlude, that was about the time I got married. Something of a dowry, my father named me as executive manager of the Lundein café he owned; as the birthplace of iced crème, it was doing very well and even popular with foreign nobility. It was simply named after the road it was on at the time, so I renamed it: L’étoile Cerf.

Back to Iris again. While she did well and worked hard, the restaurant started to buckle under unreasonable demands by the owner, and she was fired as a cost-saving measure. (It soon went bankrupt anyway, probably sooner without her.) So I hired her to run “my” café. I mean, it’s a lot more complicated than that and she both showed and proved her capability, but there’s no need to go into detail. The results since then have been good, and she eventually married the dessert chef; I am fairly sure it’s because he would give her leftover iced crème and other treats.

As for Lottie and Gwen (and Greg), I guess you would say they lived happily. True to my word, I invited Gwen to be a flower girl at my wedding (and I invited Lottie and Greg to attend), and I sewed her dress myself. Gwen eventually married her childhood friend Danny. (I was rather happy to hear that—he was such a nice boy.) She even let me sew her wedding dress as well. In fact, she insisted on it, saying it wouldn’t fair if Iris had one made by me and she didn’t.

In my second year, I did continue with Gwen’s lessons. However, not like I had before. Part of coming to terms with my status included using it to help. So I started a club where we would go to the church on Saturday mornings and offer lessons to whatever children wanted to come, framing it as charity. Violet helped a lot with getting it set up and making lesson plans, and my other friends helped as well, joining me in town to teach the children.

Those were fun times.

Gwen went on to work at Café Au Lait when she was old enough, and then later joined my and my husband’s household as a governess. While a governess is usually an awkward position, someone neither family nor servant, we of course treated her warmly. That lasted a year before she returned to marry Danny, and they eventually had two sons. Perhaps Lottie told Gwen about the troubles she had, because the older son is named after Greg (though everyone close to him calls him Junior).

As for Lottie and Greg, well, Greg is still working, but he’s teaching Gwen how to manage the store and I expect he will hand it over when both of her sons are married and leave the house. Lottie, I gave her an open offer of work if she ever wants it, but she has so far never taken me up on it. However, she often comes to Lundein with Terri to see Iris, and so we meet up for tea at those times.

That reminds me, I looked into the old Kent estate maids as well. Beth is doing well with two children of her own. Well, they’re grown up and married now. Georgie has three, the older two married and the youngest brother a bit of a bachelor. Rosie was less fortunate, and I won’t go into details to respect her privacy, but she’s working at the Kent Estate again (now under Joshua’s ownership) and in good spirits when I see her. Oh and Liv still works for me. She followed me when I moved out, and eventually married. Since I’m not so fussed on the unspoken rules, I saw no reason for her to quit if she still wanted to work, so she carried on, taking a few years off to have her two daughters before returning to work.

Every year at Yule, I send them a small hamper of festive treats as thanks for caring for me. In exchange, I receive long letters which detail all the happenings of their children, one of my favourite things to read. (In Rosie’s case, she tells me about how Joshua and Ellen’s children are doing.)

Who else…. Ah, if we go back to the school, then Ms Berks. In my second year, she took me a lot more seriously—especially after seeing my progress with oil painting. She actually tried to convert the embroidery club to an art club, but I was stubborn enough to make her shout at me. A fun memory. Still, she supported me. In turn, I tried to support her, and for many years afterwards I did. While I never submitted my work to exhibitions or anything like that, I would visit her at the school and show her what I’d done, and we would drink tea and chat. She even attended my wedding, and helped to embroider my wedding dress. Unfortunately, she lost her struggle a few years ago. I didn’t know I could cry so much.

Happier things…. Well, I should talk about my friends. Not much of a surprise, like Evan and Trissy, my group of friends sort of paired up.

In the second year, Belle showed a certain interest in Julian that eventually became courting and an engagement, the first of us to marry at the tender age of twenty. (Her family insisted on her going through with her debut even if she wasn’t looking for suitors.)

While Belle mostly played the happy (upper-class) housewife at first, when both of their children started attending school, she began to involve herself in Julian’s work. The city of Hastings becoming a crown city meant that he had a lot of work and, though she told me he would always complain about her, he told me he was rather thankful for her help and support during those busy and hectic times. Without the city to manage (only really leaving the docks), he turned to horticulture, something Belle is very helpful with given her family’s background in naturalism.

For a time after our schooling, Cyril courted Violet, but that didn’t lead to anything. Jemima took that as her chance to pursue him and she has been rather pleased with herself for snagging him ever since.

Cyril pursued his writing, going to university to study literature (where he met Oscar—I’ll tell you about him later) and then releasing a wide variety of stories and four (as of last month) books of poems. Not exactly a household name, he is well-known amongst readers and has a good reputation for his skills. I have a small mention in every book he has released for reading over his drafts and offering him my opinions—usually something along the lines of, “With thanks to E.B. who once again made me doubt whether this is even worth publishing.”

Now, he did also release a book not long after my pregnancy, which is the only book I didn’t help him with, yet I still have a rather sweet mention in it: “With no thanks to E.B. who decided procreation was more important than this story; she wasn’t wrong. I wish her children a healthy and happy life.”

Jemima also helped him a lot with his writing, giving him a female perspective and correcting the sorts of oversights male authors sometimes have. She gradually picked up editing skills as well, eventually studying under an editor from the publishing house Cyril submitted most of his stories through, and has been his editor for the last ten years or so.

Helena took a little longer, but she actually married the last of the princes. That is, “dopey” prince Percy. Despite his “title”, he’s not at all slow or clumsy, just rather reserved and usually has a vacant-looking smile. They met through a coincidence—actually because of Oscar’s work (and he looked into Percy at my suggestion).

Like Lottie, she had a difficult pregnancy and we honestly weren’t sure if she or her child would survive the birth. It was by far the scariest time of my life, far more so than my own pregnancy. Fortunately, they both made it, but she was infirm for nearly a year afterwards. She and her baby girl had her large family and all of us friends to care for her, though, so there was no shortage of love to help her recover and to help the baby stay healthy.

Like Greg, she told me Percy never brought up having another child, wholeheartedly loving his daughter.

Her constitution never entirely recovered, so she has kept to a slow and peaceful life raising her daughter and, when her health is good, she visits friends and family to teach our daughters flower arranging or French. (She doesn’t like sitting around all the time, thinks it sets a bad example for her own daughter.)

More about Percy, he is a second son, so he has no title of his own. However, he was given a modest house (by nobility standards) in the countryside and a flat in Lundein, as well as an allowance, so he and Helena have lived a comfortable life since the marriage. His talent for metal magic lead to him being something of a tinkerer and inventor, and is one of the few people in Anglia actually certified to make clocks. As such, he has a couple of businesses based around things he has made.

Violet hasn’t married, and not through a shortage of interested parties. Rather, she has been wholeheartedly devoted to her career since her debut. For ten years, she played the political socialite, building connections and gaining experience as an aide or assistant to various Lords (including my father). Although her father tried to strong-arm her into marrying first, he eventually gave in and passed his seat in the chamber to her upon her thirtieth birthday.

In these last fifteen-odd years, she has accomplished quite a lot, and I’m very happy both for her success and for what those accomplishments are. The year she helped me with teaching in Tuton eventually lead to her adopting my views on mandatory education for everyone, and so her crowning achievement has been the institution of free schools which are available to every child. The other important legislature she introduced and/or supported has been focused around gender equality, things like allowing married women to maintain separate bank accounts and property ownership. Her prominence has also opened up discussions on career women and women working full-time, which has started challenging the status quo as universities for women have opened and young women have been applying for jobs that have traditionally been only for men.

For my part, all I can do to help her is talk to lords and ladies. I used to wonder if that really helped, but she told me it did, so I trust her.

That said, I have given the communities a lot of support in my years. Early on, using profit from the café, I opened a public library in Lundein. And when Iris came in as manager, we transitioned it into a proper charitable venture, which funded the opening of more public libraries, building playgrounds, and protecting green space in cities.

It’s rather nice because, in the last five or so years, we’re seeing a lot of people who have lifted themselves into the middle-class thanks to the education reforms. Some of them even donate to the public libraries since the freely available books helped them. And whenever Oscar and I visit the various parks and greens, we see children playing, families having picnics—a lovely sight.

Ah, I am somewhat talking of myself again, aren’t I? Let us discuss the Kent family first.

My parents are well and happy with all their grandchildren (and first great-grandchild). Once Clarice, Joshua, and I were married, they went back to their quieter life. My mother started writing again: a series of romantic stories set amongst the nobility, full of drama and falling in love with the wrong kind of people and affairs. Of course, they have all been published under a pseudonym (one that only my father and Cyril and I know). Her social circle isn’t the largest, but, like me and Clarice, she has quite the flair, and she has sent many guests to my charity galas or brought in patrons for the causes I support.

Meanwhile, my father has (since his retirement) been helping both Violet and I a lot. Violet’s father did prepare her for her position, but he was more focused on maintaining the barony; whereas, even now, my father has favours to call in and otherwise just has a wealth of knowledge of politics, so he rounded out her skills and offers advice. For me, he knows about starting companies and charities, and he knows plenty of skilled people in near enough every profession.

Both of my parents have been invaluable help for me in reaching my goals. But they are also important friends to me now, the gap between us that had built up in my teenage years slowly eroding as I grew older. While I still treat them with respect (especially after the experience of raising my own children), I feel like we are equals now.

Clarice has been well as well. Like clockwork, she chose a suitor a year after her debut, and they were engaged a year later, married a year after that, and then a son came along… nine months since the wedding. (We still make fun of her for that, but she always just brushes us off with a beaming smile.) A little more than a year later, she had a second son. Her husband is from a cadet branch of the royal family (she often boasts about being married to the thirtieth-or-so in line to the throne) who owns land in France but no actual landed title in Anglia. Thus, they often holiday across the channel, and she often sends letters praising the French wine.

Joshua, well, it’s quite the funny story. You see, after my schooling finished, Florence rather tried to be matchmaker for me and Julian. However, all her frequent visits did was introduce Joshua to Ellen (who she always brought along). So it was that Evan and I eventually became in-laws. Fortunately, both my parents and Ellen’s parents are easygoing, so there wasn’t any fuss with her being a couple of years older than Joshua. They had a daughter, a son, and then another daughter, and they live at the Kent estate.

Florence herself went through her debut and found a nice young lord, making a happy little family. She and Ellen are still close and pass the time visiting each other and knitting. As they both live outside of Lundein, it really is like we’re still pen pals, mostly talking by letter. I’m always happy to see an envelope on my desk with either of their handwriting on the front.

Is there anyone else? I suppose not. I mean, there are people I have met since my schooling, but you would hardly care to hear of them. Suffice to say, I am still making new friends as recently as this morning—the midwife who assisted with my granddaughter’s birth.

Well, let us talk about me.

Following my schooling, I prepared for my debut, but I didn’t take it as seriously as Clarice. I only attended events if my friends would also be there, and only hosted events if they would attend. While Clarice barely had a day off during the social season, I barely got dressed up twice a week.

Despite that, I attracted a fair share of suitors, my status and appearance more than enough for most. (Cyril told me that, from what he heard, my infrequent appearances actually gave me a reputation as a shy and timid lady, modest, above the petty gossiping of other women. I laughed at that, and so did my friends when I told them.)

None of them suited me, though. It was hard to shake the feeling that their interest in me was shallow and the limited conversations I could have with them didn’t exactly help matters. But I wasn’t in a rush, so I went along with the flow, trying to get to know some of those interested.

However, it was Cyril who introduced me to my husband (unintentionally). It’s not the sort of story that anyone would want to read, so I won’t bore you with the details. His name is Oscar and he is a nice man in an awkward way. The sort of person who rarely shows emotion and yet buys a present months in advance because I mention it in passing. That stoic nature of his softened once I was with child, and he gradually learned to convey his love and affection more openly. Still, he is someone slow to anger, patient to a fault, and willing to listen to my ramblings (albeit with little enthusiasm).

When I met him, he was finishing a doctorate degree in physics; however, his passion has always been writing. In particular, he writes science fiction and, through this, I have shared many ideas of technology from Ellie’s world. While I don’t know how something like a steam engine works, I hoped that the idea itself might inspire people. After earning his degree, he took on a teaching position and has since maintained an interesting reputation on campus. (I will now and then meet past students of his who are delighted to finally meet the woman who could marry such an eccentric man.)

Since our marriage, we have lived in an apartment in Lundein near his university. Unlike Ellie’s world, the air is clear, which means cities are rather pleasant to live in and there are no health risks either. Violet moved in opposite us and she currently lives with her (female) assistant. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have my suspicions of their situation, but Violet hasn’t said anything and I trust her to tell me if it is ever my business.

Oscar and I married in the summer after my twenty-first (him being two years my senior). While I was busy with my things, he was busy with his things, and so it would be four years later that I became pregnant, giving birth to twin girls in the following spring: Elizabeth and Victoria. However, we ended up calling them by their middle names: May and Lily.

Oh the stories I could tell about those two growing up. Alas, I know no one wants to hear stories of other people’s children, so I shall spare you. All I will say is that Oscar never brought up having more children, and he would have regretted it if he ever had.

While May and Lily lived up to their title of identical twins for the first half of their childhood, they started growing in different directions by their teen years, especially after puberty. With our proximity to Violet, the twins knew her well and Lily started to take after her. She became more serious, read technical books rather than fiction, and even copied the hairband braid.

On the other hand, May found my old handmade dresses and became obsessed with a kind of off-brand fashion. She wouldn’t let me teach her to sew, so I had to bring in Iris, and then she made her own outfits and accessories in colours and patterns that reminded me of eighties fashion from Ellie’s world. A sort of visual jazz with a guitar tuned only to sharp notes.

And they have always been very sweet children. Oh there were periods where they hate me or Oscar or both of us, long days where they hated each other, and many times when I had to remind myself, “I don’t hate them, I just hate how they are acting,” but that is all outweighed by the joy and pride and fulfilment raising them has given me.

With how close my friends and I still are, all our children grew up like cousins, often seeing each other. As such, Lily and James (Trissy and Evan’s oldest son I mentioned earlier) became childhood sweethearts of a sort. While they technically are cousins because of Ellen and Joshua’s marriage, it’s not by blood, so no need to fuss. Given the times, they didn’t even kiss until the engagement (as far as I know, teenagers notoriously sneaky when in love), but they have been happily married since a little after she turned eighteen (him being a year older).

There was some tension as May was sweet on him as well, at least when they were all young teens, but he was pretty open with his mutual interest in Lily, so May devoted herself more to her fashion. That lead her down an artistic path which brought her to meet an architect who she is currently engaged to (after a similar back-and-forth as I had with Oscar).

Going back to Lily and James, it is their daughter I held this morning. Her name is Margaret and, after asking Lily, she confirmed that… she is named in memory of Ms Berks. As if I needed another reason to cry today.

So here we are, somewhat caught up as I sit at the desk in my bedroom.

Oh, I suppose there is one last topic—the faerie kings’ hearts. I should start by saying that, although I grew so very anxious about the approaching “catastrophe” in my senior year, nothing manifested. As dull of a conclusion as in Snowdrop and the Seven Princes. At the end of the year, I asked Lottie if anything had happened in town, but all she knew of was a small fire that damaged a bakery (not Pete’s one), no casualties. I still wonder if that fire was supposed to grow out of control, or if I indirectly stopped something else from happening, or if it was something that Eleanor indirectly caused. Regardless, I blame the author.

As far as any wishing goes, I’ve come to think that, perhaps, I already made my wishes. Evan and Julian are still my friends, and Cyril and I are still close. Maybe those times when I could see the faeries came about because they granted my wish.

Well, that’s just me being a bit romantic about the situation. It would be quite unnerving if interdimensional beings with supernatural powers could actually control our minds to keep us being friends.

Anyway, what else is there to say?

Forty-six years old… it sounds like such an old number, yet I could well have another fifty years left to live. Fifty years of helping people, making new friends, my family growing, and eventually those final goodbyes to the people I know and love. There is no such thing as a world full of only happiness, not even in stories.

For all I have accomplished, I have never thought of myself as someone who can change the world. Even now, I see myself more as someone who can give other people the chance to change themselves for the better, to become people who can change the world. To that end, I have worked hard, and I think have done a lot of good.

Really, what more can a person hope for than to leave the world a better place?