Diego Brando's Mother

She is a young woman whose long, dark hair is broken only by a pair of fair blonde strands falling at the front.

Though she and her husband once left their infant in the ground to die, she reversed that choice almost at once and poured herself entirely into the boy afterward. Poverty never dulled her insistence on dignity. She made teaching Diego pride her mission and gave up whatever she had to raise him, at one point catching scalding soup in her bare hands day after day because the household owned no bowls.

She lived in a destitute corner of Britain with her husband, Dario, and in 1870 their grinding poverty drove the couple to carry their newborn into the hills and bury him alive beneath a white cloth. A rising storm flooded the nearby river, tore the child loose from the earth, and swept him downstream, at which point her resolve broke and she plunged in to rescue him, taking a blow from Dario for defying him as she did.

A farmhand found her unconscious afterward, and she took work on his farm under a new surname, Brando, raising Diego there through endless labor. Years later the same farmer who had saved her demanded her body as payment for her life; when she refused, he ruined the pair's soup bowls, forcing her to cradle boiling stew in her hands. Tetanus soon set in and she died at twenty-three, telling Diego with her last words that none of it was his fault and that his gift with horses could carry him to a jockey's life. Convinced the farmer's cruelty had killed her, Diego turned that grief into a hunger to rise above everyone who had ever looked down on them.