Daphné and Étienne Lisieux were Norman aristocrats with lots of money and plenty of male heirs. Unusually for highborn parents, they were hoping for a daughter or two that they could marry off to a richer lord or duke, perhaps even a prince or a king, if they were lucky.
And finally on a snowy (again, unusual) November night, a little girl was born. Given the name Evangeline Angélique, she was mostly cared for by a nanny, an army of servants, a weapons master (her parents were rare believers of the opinion that girls should be as skilled as boys in combat) and a governess, but her father had also given her a slave named Yolande who became one of her best friends.
Growing up, Evangeline was very close to her three older brothers - Jean, Nathanaël and Valérian - and the twins, Adrienne and Raymond, though closest to Adrienne due to their shared femininity.
On her sixteenth birthday, and prettier than her rather unattractive parents had dared to hope, she was promised to a general who was as rich and as influential as a duke. But Evangeline did not want to be married to a widower who was at least twenty years her senior, and so she and Yolande left in the middle of the night.
After saying goodbye to Yolande, she worked for two years for select clientele, breaking the law at all hours of the day on both land and sea, but by some luck managing to evade the authorities. Eventually, she worked up enough money to purchase a ship, which she named The Enchantress' Revenge.
Without a crew, the likelihood of successful piracy was very low. So she took to run-down pubs in the port, and eventually found Scott Thackeray in one of the quietest. He was looking to join a crew, and as she was looking to begin one, they conspired to start it.
Whilst sailing along the coast of Ireland around a month later, a young clansman calling himself Rowan Cartwright appeared and demanded to join the crew. At first she couldn't understand his accent - honestly, that one was broad - but soon understood and let him join. She still enjoys teasing him about it.
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A young man named Kamden Emsworth joined the crew after that, a rather violent thief, but still friendly.
When they docked in a port in England, Evangeline began to notice another talented young thief, Adam Atkinson, who operated there. She offered him a position in the crew, promising that he could steal as much as he wanted whenever they docked, and he accepted.
Very soon after that, they captured a young violinist, Clarice Barnes, in a similar port not particularly far away. They would have killed her, if Adam had not convinced them that the girl's music would be a great source of morale upon the ship. He was right, and Evangeline doesn't regret sparing her life.