“Miss Valencia’s mother was sixteen years old when she arrived in Gotham. Her parents were upstanding, British citizens who kicked their daughter out of the house when they found out she was pregnant. Their housekeeper, a cousin of mine, sent Talia Carter to stay here at Wayne Manor until her parents relented. They never did.
“It was about a year after your parents’ death. Miss Talia knew nothing about housekeeping, but the staff soon fell in love with her. She was such a young, thoughtless yet kind-hearted thing, and we all thought Miss Valencia was the most beautiful baby ever born… saving yourself, of course.
“It was obvious from a very young age that Miss Valencia was quite intelligent. They tested her repeatedly in the schools, called her a genius and allowed her to skip a couple years. By the time she was ten, she was at Brentwood Academy.”
“The elite school here in the Palisades? Only the richest in Gotham can get their kids in, which is why my father didn’t want me to go there.”
“You never met Talia Carter. She got her daughter everything she possibly could, and then some. But as much as she loved her daughter and wanted the absolute best for her for her own sake, I believe part of it was fueled by revenge. She wanted to turn Miss Valencia into a wonder, a prodigy, and make her own parents sorry for abandoning her and missing out on helping raise their grandchild. So Miss Valencia had all the lessons, played all the sports, attended all the parties her mother thought necessary for her upbringing.
“Yet in many ways, Miss Valencia was the more adult of the pair of them, the more responsible one who got their bills paid on time and made sure the necessities came before everything else. I don’t think she ever cared much for playing the piano, swimming competitively or riding horses, but she seemed to bear her mother’s enthusiasm for all those things with a sort of…”
“Condescension?” The memory of his brief meeting with her surfaces in Bruce’s mind, the politely tolerant but loftily self-assured way she had addressed him.
The older man looks at him sharply. “I suppose you could call it that,” he says slowly, “an affectionately tempered sort of condescension. Her mother wanted her to be a prodigy, so she played the part as she did everything else—wonderfully. And it worked… for a while.
“Miss Valencia was able to get into Gotham Preparatory Academy on the Wayne Scholarship, which was started by your parents and funds the education of one outstanding student at Gotham Prep for four years,” he elaborates, seeing the blank look on Bruce’s face. “I tried to talk Miss Talia out of it. She was much too young, only 13, and she didn’t have the advantages of her classmates, but it was too good a chance to pass up, so she went, and that’s where it all started.
“He was a Wayne Scholar as well, but a couple of years ahead of her. The more she saw of him, the less we saw of her, and it frightened her mother. Miss Talia even began to talk of withdrawing her from the school if she persisted in seeing him, but for the first time in her life Miss Valencia absolutely refused to do as her mother wished. So Miss Valencia stayed at Gotham Prep, and they became inseparable.
“They thought the world of each other, and everyone could see it wouldn’t—couldn’t—end well. They were too young, too... in love, if that’s possible. When they were together, everyone else didn’t matter anymore, and the bouts of depression and despair that Miss Valencia suffered when they were apart for any amount of time or during one of their few fights was almost painful to witness.
“When he graduated, Miss Talia thought that would be the end of it, but he gave up a scholarship to MIT, opting instead to study at Gotham University in order to stay close to her. Miss Valencia began to talk about going to Gotham University once she graduated, and this was the final straw for her mother. Miss Talia began to make plans to move back to London upon Miss Valencia’s graduation, but then something happened that changed everything.
“You see, he wasn’t bad person—he seemed to care a great deal for Miss Valencia—but he’d grown up with the wrong sort of people, starting with his father. They lived in the Narrows and one day, when Miss Valencia was visiting him, she walked in on a fight between father and son. He ended up pulling a knife on his father and wounding him severely.
“There was a trial, and it caught the entire city’s attention. With the suspect and the main witness both Wayne Scholars, the company’s lawyers got involved, since it would be bad for business if he were convicted. Needless to say, he was cleared of all charges on the basis of self-defense, but they didn’t stop there. They unearthed evidence against his father, his ties to drug rings and the black market, thousands of dollars of gambling debts. They were even able to implicate some of the other criminals and locked them all up. They fed the media a trumped up version of his life as a disadvantaged youth struggling to break free of the world of crime he had grown up in, and they absolutely loved it.
“Miss Valencia got her share of the media attention as well. She was the faithful girlfriend who never left his side during the entire trial, a maid’s daughter who was on the verge of becoming the youngest graduate at Gotham Prep and valedictorian too. The company was determined that they would live out a fairytale. Their happiness would show that Wayne Enterprises’ philanthropic spirit hadn’t died with Thomas Wayne.
“They talked about running away from it all, the pressure and scrutiny, the high expectations placed on them. Sometimes I wonder if things would have ended better if I hadn’t interfered, but I did. Her mother locked her in a room the night they planned to leave. Miss Valencia made herself sick crying and yelling, and we were forced to sedate her. He didn’t show up the next day, or the next. Her mother was convinced he had run away without her, and as the days passed, Miss Valencia seemed to start thinking the same thing… until his body washed up on the riverbank.
“Miss Valencia was supposed to have met him on a bridge that night, and while he waited for her, his father’s associates, the ones that had been scapegoated by the lawyers, attacked him. To distance themselves and the company, the lawyers let leak a story that he had been addicted to drugs, that the attack was a result of a drug deal gone wrong. They were poised to continue exploiting Valencia, setting her up as the innocent victim in all of this, but they never had the chance.
“She’d somehow gotten her hands on the sleeping pills we’d given her, and she took the whole bottle. We barely got her to the hospital in time. She very nearly died. Her heart stopped for a few minutes. But by some miracle, she survived, and before she was up and about, her mother had her on a plane to London. I later heard from my cousin that Miss Talia made amends with her parents, who helped take care of Miss Valencia.
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