INTRODUCTION

This story- although a fairy-tale- doesn’t begin with once upon a time nor does it end in happily ever after. No, our story begins in a small town- not too far from here- where an ambitious young girl called Arabella lives with her widowed father, Abraham. Arabella doesn’t come from a large or rich family, it is just her and her alcoholic father that live in the small two-bedroom townhouse in the middle of the small, yet quaint township of Redwood.

Arabella’s mother passed away when she was but a baby, though her father never told her the exact story behind it. He brought Arabella to Redwood shortly after, and began their new life. When Arabella was seven years old, she began to notice her father’s strange behaviour and that he spent an awful lot of his time at the local tavern, drowning his sorrows at the bar.

At the age of ten, Arabella had her first experience with the cruelty that her father had bottled up inside of him. That night, she pushed her bed against her bedroom door and spent the night curled in a ball on the other side of the room.

Now, the freshly turned eighteen-year-old Arabella, knew who she wanted to be, knew that she wanted to do for people what only one person had done for her. From the tender age of eight, the elderly librarian, Finnigan, spent most of his weekends teaching Arabella how to read. The people in the township never sent their daughters to school, nor did they teach them anything that could make them useful members of society. The women in Redwood weren’t bakers, or builders. They weren’t included in voting or town dealings. No, the women of Redwood were housewives and seamstresses. None of them knew how to read or write; even to write their own name was an impossibility.

With Arabella being the only woman that could read, she decided to open a night school for the women of the town, and teach a few of the younger girls during the day while their fathers and brothers were at work or school. This is where Arabella would find herself in the most trouble of her life, but it would also lead her down a path to who she was truly destined to be.