Once upon a time, there was a wicked step-mother name Nadia.  She was married to Marcus Bromwell, a prominent industrialist, who she slowly poisoned to death. In her own mind, she wasn't wicked.  She simply wanted what she wanted and the world owed her.<br/><br/>Nadia was born Nadia Rominov.  From a prominent Russian family in exile, she married as high as she could.  Titles did not matter to her, but money did.  She was a countess in her own right, but had no money to speak of.  When handsome, and rather gullible, Marcus came along, she felt God had answered her prayers.<br/><br/>Nadia was, in her day, a stately beauty with dark brown locks and deep black eyes.  She turned the head of many a noble, but none of them had the finances to suit her.  Even at the beginning of our story, in her early fifties, she was a beauty to behold, despite her salt and pepper hair.<br/><br/>Marcus and Nadia had twin daughters,  Marsha and Suzanna, who took after their mother in looks.  While not the devastating beauties she was, they were certainly pretty to behold.  If only their demeanor matched their exterior, our story might have been different, but they were vain and spoiled.<br/><br/>There was a third daughter, Lilith, a product of an earlier marriage, who was used like a servant and generally abused by the Nadia and her seed.  She was a startling beauty with raven tresses and ocean blue eyes.  Her womanly figure and plump bosom would have attracted suitors if she had not always been dressed like a peasant and covered in the soot of the fire she slept next too.<br/><br/>On the day our story begins, Nadia and her brood, were preparing for a party.  The local baron, one Lamont Rothschild, was throwing the party for his spinster daughter, to find her a suitable companion for her old age.  She was well past the age marriage usually was started at, and he despaired of finding her a husband.  Her name was Lucinda, or Lucy, and she was a wayward and willful girl.  Instead of a husband, he thought to find her suitable female companionship in the form of a friend to share her lonely life with.<br/><br/>His daughter, at the grand old age of twenty three, as a blue eyed beauty with shoulder length blond hair, most often pulled back into a simple ponytail.  She rejected the elegant dresses of her contemporaries, instead dressing in breaches like a boy, or in simple country dresses.<br/><br/>But I digress.  At Nadia's household, her daughters were in fine fiddle, ordering poor Lilith about, and calling her by their nickname for her, Cinderella.<br/><br/>"Cinderella, make my bed and get my breakfast." Shouted one, from the top of the grand staircase.  "Only after you draw my bath."  Yelled the other from the upstairs washroom.  All the time Nadia's bell was ringing and ringing, summoning poor Lilith to her presence.