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Letter from

John Greenway,

January 1850

Hello, my boy, this is your guardian, John Greenway, writing to you from the distant past. It is my fervent hope that I am beside you today as you read these words, but I am already an old man and the world is harsh and full of danger, so I may not survive to share this day with you.

You will now be aged in double figures, probably in your early teens. There will be many new things happening in your life, and strange feelings will be flowing through you. I have a great responsibility to you that I accepted from your father, and I will now attempt to fill the yawning gaps in your past. As I begin to write these words, I am sitting in my cabin in a tall ship, watching a dark sea swell against the sides of the vessel as a strong south-bound wind drives us ever closer to our destination in the new world. I have agonised long and hard over how I might compile this journal, for I want it to be an accurate account of the strange and wonderful things I have seen since I met your father just under a year ago.

In the end I have decided to write the journal as a story rather than as a series of entries with dates and times. God knows I have lost track of time anyway, but as I begin to write, it is somewhere in January, in the year 1850. And as well as I can work out, you were born in October last year, but I don’t know the date. Forgive me if I am not the greatest of authors, but I will do my best to relate my narrative as a story, and a true one, though it will seem fantastic to you in the beginning. In writing of your early life in this way, I hope to capture the mystery and the harshness of the desert and the wondrous things I have seen there. I will endeavour to describe every event in detail, both the things I saw and my depth of feeling at the time.

I hope that you may have the impression of being there with us through it all – as indeed you were for most of it. But you were so young that you will retain no memories of it, or at least I doubt that you could. There are many things I do not know of your parents and their people, nor will I ever know them now. I only know what I saw, and what your father told me during our long vigil together, and whatever else I observed of him during our great adventures. Likewise, there is little I know of your mother, only that she was beautiful and kind, and that there was a powerful love between your parents that must now course through your own veins.

So what follows is the story of your beginnings, my boy, and what is not told in these pages will never be known. I hope this account will explain many things to you and fill you with a great love for your parents and a passion to go on and honour your father’s wishes in the new land. Read with pleasure, and then read again with a studious mind, for you have much to do in your life.

John Greenway