Note: The question asked was, "Any memories of when your sister was a baby, Frederic?"
Many, oh I have many of my spitfire little sister. But to properly know her, I suppose we must delve into her origins.
Nessa is what the old folklore calls the "moon angel's child" and Mother named her accordingly. The root of her name comes from Esther, meaning "star" in the ancient tongue, and the suffix "van" means "of" – hence, Vanessa is, literally, the child of the stars, or the young offspring of the moon itself, according to ancient mythology. As we know, when the moon angels gave birth to the stars, they were called "wee vanessas", which is also how we come to the well-known lullaby "Good-night Nessa" (a song that my own wee Vanessa loved to hear over and over again).
Before Vanessa was born, Mother weaved a spell for her birth. Now, Mother is a superstitious type. She believed in quaint rustic folk spells and old wives' tales linked to her childhood out in the the country estates, far from the sophistication that was brought upon her marriage into the Nightray family. Father always indulged her whimsical pendants and "bush witch" remedies. After Ernest, I recall as a youth how she started a regimen that promised her next child would share her gender (after three boys, I suspected she wanted more docile progeny!)
She drank the prescribed tonics and herbs and prayed to the proper gods; though I was at Dodgson's Point as a cadet at the time, during holidays I recalled her basking out on the veranda in the summer night's moonshine (for the angels of the moon were feminine, and she wanted their touch to bless her womb).
During her pregnancy, Mother was bedridden with pains for several months. "The babe kicks like a stallion," pronounced the family physician, "I refrain from acting dismissive towards the natural arts, Lady Nightray, but I doubt the moon's heard your prayers."
Mother snapped fiercely, "She kicks like a Nightray–damn you!" (Mother rarely swears or throws a fit, so I suspect that bit of the fiery pain caused during Nessa's gestation transplanted the seeds of her future self).
Dear Nessa was a winter child, born on the longest night of the year. Like with Claude and Ernest, Father was there in the room next door, pacing and sweating, and I was there as well – it is cowardly for a man to be driven off by the screams of his beloved woman when she is committed in doing a female's greatest duty toward her family.
The midwife emerged after many hours, a satisfied smile on her face: "Angels bless her," she announced. "She's a star babe."
And that describes Nessa perfectly: small and fierce and bright, she is, and she will burn and burn even during the darkest of hours.