What a strange child he was! Tall, slender, with wild hair the color of autumn and beautiful green eyes the color of spring, full of mischief and wonder. He came to my mother's house from distant relatives on my father's side. They had died and left their inheritance to a friend, but their child to my parents. He was but one then, and I a few months younger than that.
We were friends from the very start. In our child- like way, we babbled as babies do in words incoherent to an adult's ears. Adults, we realized quickly, can be so very deaf.
Because of him, I learned to walk months before I probably should have. In fact, my slow development as an infant had my doctors worried, but when he came, that soon changed. I remember that a short time after his arrival, he pulled me up by my hands with an unusual amount of strength and walked backwards, which, in turn, forced me to walk forward. He then let go, beckoning me to walk on my own, but was soon stopped by my nurse, Fanny. She was completely shocked that Peter had pulled me up like that and scooped me up in her arms, failing to realize I had just taken my first steps. Adults, you see, are so very blind.
Blindness and deafness aside, my mother, the very kind Lady Charlotte Kenneth, adored him, as did my father, Lord Edward. While they never quite loved him, much less understood him, as I did, they treated him as if he was their own son, and not the offspring of some distant relative they knew nothing about. They really were wonderful parents. He just failed to realize it. Or perhaps he did, but did not care. He never loved him as I loved them, never thought of them as parents, and never thought of me as a sister, though it was I that he cared for above everyone else.
He taught me everything, and he was everything to me. He was Peter Pan.