Martyn MacDonald Adams

Eulalia 

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At first glance, Eulalia does not appear intimidating, but after a while you’ll start feeling uncomfortable in her company. She was born in her mother’s house in 1882. She has fair hair and stands about 5 feet 6 inches. She has a slim and athletic build. She’s very good looking and knows it.  

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Her father was unknown because her mother, at the time, had to make ends meet and employment in her hometown was difficult. Like a lot of the people that lived in the slums, her mother was exploited. Eulalia’s older sister, Augusta, did manage to find more creative ways to survive but, like her mother, she too was ill-used.  

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At the start of our tale, the family is only one step away from being evicted from their hovel. If they had been, they would have become feral. That is a homeless life, begging, living hand-to-mouth, and living off the land. Eulalia is very aware of the evils of the society in which she lives, and it affects her attitude.   

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The girl is highly intelligent, very self-motivated, ambitious, and physically confident. On the downside, she has no empathy or compassion and is self-obsessed. She believes herself to be superior to everyone else. She is able to kill with no remorse and simply does not understand the benefits of, or the need for, human relationships. She has strong psychopathic tendencies.  

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In early life she had difficulty with facial expressions. As she grows older, she becomes more adept at acting. She enjoys manipulating others.

  

Eulalia believes in God. She was taught about God by the local vicar, so her nuanced opinion of the deity is taken from what she has been told and what she has read. For instance, only a deity with the mindset of a petulant 14-year-old would drown everyone because He simply couldn’t be arsed to appear before them and tell them to be nice to each other. 

 

Thus, her view of Him is probably not one that the church would condone. Furthermore, any deity that watches children masturbate at night just has to be a bit of a pervert and that is certainly in keeping with her view of Him as having the mentality of a 14-year-old boy. 

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Later, Eulalia becomes aware of her emotions but is unsure how to deal with them. She feels an attraction to Preben, loss after rejecting Michael, and then feels jealousy when she discovers Major Fadden’s affair. Perhaps, if she thought about it, she might regret her sister’s loss too; but she doesn’t dwell on the past. 

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Michael’s rise from a lowly feral to that of a skilled worker in just a few days is a puzzle to her and she wants to know more. Only later, when she meets him in person, does her view of him change. But then his apparent ability to come through crises with amazing success confuses her again. To her, he is simultaneously creepy, a loser, and yet a winner too. Is he a genius playing a complicated game? Considering his attitude to her - is he, in fact, a manifestation of God? 

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In the end she finds his honesty re-assuring. She starts to understand him and knows his feelings for her to be genuine. So, she trusts him to be loyal but, more importantly, knows how to manipulate him. Besides, the inventions he inspires make him valuable.