Quotes from Julia Baird

any breaches

There are few things as startling as encountering an unearthly glow in the wild. Glow-worms. Ghost mushrooms. Fireflies. Flashlight fish. Lantern sharks. Vampire squid. Our forest floors and ceilings, our ocean depths and fringes are full of luminous beings, creatures lit from the inside. And they have, for many centuries, enchanted us, like glowing missionaries of wonder, emissaries of awe. Is there anything more beautiful than living light?

Both had lost parents at an early age, and while Albert did not have a rift with his father as Victoria did with her mother, both ached for an idyllic domesticity they had dreamed of as children.