Louise Seymour

Louise Gladys Seymour (1893-1918)  was an English-American socialite and a member of the prestigious Dixon family, and was the first female heiress.

She was also the eldest daughter of Allan Dixon and his wife, Cornelia. She was also the older sister of Marjorie Dixon. Following this, Louise was the wife of Ralph Seymour and also a known ancestor of her great-niece, Chloe Dixon.

Early Life
Louise Gladys Dixon was born to Allan Dixon and Cornelia O'Connell on March 15, 1893 in Oxfordshire England. According to her family, she was baptized as Anglican. Her family relocated themselves to Rochester, New York, where they settled at Dixon Mansion. It wasn't long after Louise turned twelve that her younger sister, Marjorie Dixon was born on April 7, 1905.

Louise spent her childhood learning not only etiquette lessons on how to be a lady, but she soon became accustomed to most of her father's friends visiting the estate on business. Over the years, Louise recalled various people she had meet, including the prominent Astor family and the Morgans. She later claims that her first kiss was at the age of fourteen with J.J. Astor's sixteen year old son, Vincent.

Louise met Ralph Seymour, a young stockbroker, when he came to consult her father about investing money into the estate in 1910. They were married by the following spring in April 1911, three weeks after Louise had turned eighteen. They spent two weeks in the German countryside enjoying the tranquility of sleepy villages and indulge in sweets made by candy masters. They returned shortly after their honeymoon and Ralph soon took a position selling stocks to investors, but never really enjoyed doing it.

Once Ralph left the position, he and Louise decided to take a little vacation in Russia where they ate, talked, and played in the colorful city of St. Petersburg. They stayed at an elegant hotel in the central part of the city and even made time to attend Louise's favorite ballet, Swan Lake. When they heard about a ship called the Titanic that would travel from Southampton England to New York City, they couldn't refuse the offer and bought their tickets.

Haunted
Louise was one of the first people Chloe Dixon sees after she arrives on the docks of Southampton at the beginning of Haunted. After they meet, Chloe remarks how beautiful Louise is, nearly comparing her appearance to that of a porcelain doll. Although Louise is unaware of Chloe's immediate connection to the Dixons, they become friends knowing that Chloe will eventually reveal her true identity when the time is right. However, circumstances change when the ship strikes an iceberg, which propels Louise to let Chloe tell her how she got here after Chloe accidentally lets a piece of information slip out about her knowledge of the amount of lifeboats Titanic has. It isn't until after the disaster that Louise eventually knows that her familial ties to Chloe go far deeper than she ever knew, which leads her to feeling extremely guilty about making her go through things she was not able to fully understand.

Although Louise was unlikely to admit it, she saw Chloe as a close friend that she loved more than anyone else in the world. In the weeks after the disaster, Louise's father decides to blame Ralph's death on Chloe, whom he says was nothing but a nuisance. This creates a bitter relationship to spring up between Louise and her father, which lasts for the rest of her life.

The Girl Who Came Home
One night, after nine months of mourning Ralph and struggling with her family's ruined estate; Louise packed up everything she owned on Christmas Eve, and left the house by climbing out of her bedroom window. She walked all the way around the house to the back, where the family chauffeur, Bradley, kept the family car. Once she arrived at the car, she put her belongings in the backseat, opened the driver's door, and started the ignition. Before she could actually steal the car, however, her younger sister, Marjorie Dixon rushed out of the house and walked through a thick blanket of snow in her pajamas to beg Louise to stay. While Louise is flattered by this, she tells Marjorie that there's nothing left for her here at Dixon Mansion. She then proceeded to leave, leaving Marjorie alone in the snow.

Louise boards a ship to England to distance herself from her family, only to arrive in Southampton as Oxford lies farther inland. She took all of her belongings she brought with her, leaving the ship on her own. However, she nearly dropped half of her suitcases into the English Channel. However, that changed when Louise was greeted by a kind gentleman by the name of Matthew Chapel, who offered to help her with her things and gave her a ride to his flat in Oxford. During the drive there, Louise explains that Matthew is a kind-hearted man, especially when she is still grieving for her late husband, Ralph. When they arrived at Matthew's flat in Oxford, he tells her she can stay with him as long as she wants. Two months after Louise moves in with Matthew, she found herself falling in love with him. Sometime in January 1913, Louise decided to become a nurse. When rumors began spreading of England likely going to war with Germany, Matthew decides to enlist in the British Army while Louise trained to become a combat nurse. However, Louise decides to become a medical officer instead; but never tells Matthew about any of this. She eventually gets accepted into the Royal Army Medical Corps after tweaking a few things on her enlistment form, notably her marital status and her gender.

When the war started in 1914, Louise and Matthew got the jobs they wanted. Although nobody in her regiment knew Louise was wearing a man's uniform, her identity goes largely unnoticed. Over the course of the war, Louise saw combat on the Western Front, mainly on the battlefields of France and Belgium. Forced to live in unbearable trench conditions, Louise found comfort in chronicling her experience in her diary by recording everything from almost daily mortar attacks to the toll her job as a medic takes on her. Although Louise grew a thick skin due to her exposure to war, she was not immune to the several near-death experiences she had during her time as a medic. In one entry, she recalled a moment where she almost lost her eyesight due to shrapnel; but she luckily survived the attack. In another entry, she sustained a serious hand injury in the summer of 1915 from a French soldier who accidentally shot her, thinking she was a German. The reason Louise risked holding her lighter up was she was trying to signal the few French soldiers around that the British needed more medical supplies. Luckily, her fellow soldiers heard her scuffling and swooped in to rescue her and she was rushed into immediate surgery.

Louise survived her hand injury, but also became highly addicted to morphine, and slowly had to be weaned off of it by several other nurses in the field hospital. Throughout the remainder of the war, Louise suffered at least two nervous breakdowns: one in October of 1915 and another one barely a month later of that same year. However, one entry that is probably the most surprising was how she fixed Jack's leg after he got shot during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 on very little sleep.

Even though she rarely spoke of her family back home in New York, Louise did keep her relationship with her sister Marjorie throughout her service in the form of writing letters. However, the letters stopped coming during the last nine months of the war in 1917 with a strange disease erupting in the trenches that started out with mild symptoms. Louise treated people who were very sick and did not think she would get sick. When the war ended in November of 1918, Louise returned to New York with Matthew and took up a position as a nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Although she didn't know it, Louise had been exposed to a deadly disease called influenza, although she looked healthy. Louise did not feel symptoms until she ate Thanksgiving dinner at Dixon Mansion. It's believed her symptoms started when she complained the turkey tasted dry, even though her father and sister thought it tasted just fine as they had periodically checked to make sure it was seasoned well by the family cook, Ms. Ingram.

It was only when Louise took a bite of food that she also complained her stomach hurt. She ended up fainting right next to her chair and went unconscious. Afterwards, her family reacted with shock and horror and rushed her to Bellevue Hospital, having been treated by the same doctors who oversaw her work as a nurse. A few hours later that same day, doctors concluded Louise had Spanish Influenza. Over the next several weeks, Louise was quarantined at the hospital and treated every single hour. Even though she did show slight improvement after being admitted, her condition had compromised her immune system.

Eventually, Louise succumbed to the disease on the morning of December 25, 1918, having died peacefully in her sleep. Louise was only twenty-five years old when she died and was given full military honors from the British Army for her services in the war.

Physical Appearance
Louise was described as having a doll-like appearance. Aside from a pale complexion, she had thick auburn hair that went down to the middle of her back which had natural red highlights in them. Like Chloe, Louise had a broad forehead and a narrow jaw with a pointed chin. Her eyes were a dreamy shade of violet blue and were slightly larger than Chloe's, although they were closely-spaced and framed by thick, full eyelashes. Louise also possessed a thin nose that formed a button-like tip and had prominent cheekbones. One noticeable thing about Louise was that her teeth were perfectly white and naturally straight.

Like Chloe, Louise's eyebrows were darker than her hair, but were perfectly arched. When it came to her body, Louise had a well-built figure that was slightly muscular.

While her clothing style was very lavish in Haunted, she adopted a more modest wardrobe in The Girl Who Came Home and had almost no lavish dresses or gowns in her possession.

Personality and Traits
Despite being cold and cynical towards others, Louise was a sweet young woman who was extremely smart. Being independent, she often ignored social expectation and did things her own way. Louise was also very compassionate towards people who were less fortunate than herself and would always give away materialistic possessions when she did not need them.

Skills and abilities
Louise had possessed a great aptitude for excelling at things others struggled at. When she was younger, she received excellent grades at Bridgeton Preparatory School. By the time she started training as a nurse in 1913, she was able to show her skills to her instructors successfully. The key to Louise's success was that she was calm under pressure and never allowed herself to get flustered.

As a soldier, Louise was very versatile when it came to weapons. While she preferred mostly to work with swords, she was also skilled in using knives, rifles, and even throwing knives. She was also able to switch weapons mid-fight and parry attack from enemies with perfect ease, often resulting in her opponent stumbling over.

She was also incredibly agile for her size as she was able to scale everything from trees to cliffs, squeeze through tight corners, and run at a high speed where she could easily outrun an opponent or jump across areas most men her age would not be able to do.

Possessions

 * Gold wedding band: When Louise married Ralph Seymour in 1911, he gave her a simple gold wedding band. During the war, Louise often looked at it when she was distraught or afraid. Even though the other doctors tried to tell her to take it off, Louise refused to do so. She was buried with her ring still on her finger in 1918 after she succumbed to Spanish influenza.
 * Diary: As a pre-engagement present for her eighteenth birthday, Louise's best friend Lavinia Knightly gave a leather-bound journal for Louise to record her thoughts. Little did anyone know that it would hold Louise's deepest and darkest secrets from the last six years of her life. She often filled it with resentful things about her family and also graphic details of her experience in the trenches during the war as a medic for the British army.
 * Hats: Prior to Haunted, Louise owned somewhere around twenty hats all from New York or Paris. She lost half of them when the Titanic sank in 1912.
 * Books: In Haunted, Louise traveled with ten books crammed in two suitcases when she boarded the Titanic. Among them were copies of The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, and Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
 * Gramophone: A wedding gift from Vincent Astor, it featured all the parts of of a regular gramophone; but had a silver-coated horn and matching crank with a mother-of-pearl handle. Louise also had small vinyl discs featuring works done by Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and even Beethoven. After the ship sank, the gramophone survived the journey to New York as it was one of the only things Louise kept with her at all times besides her diary and her wedding band.

Relationships
Louise gained many friends during her educational years in England as well as America, where she was the first heiress to attend Bridgeton Preparatory School in 1907. Upon graduating in 1911, she had many relationships with a variety of people. She also had a romantic relationship with Vincent Astor when she was fourteen years old. When she left the world of high society in search of a more simpler life, she struggled to make new friends, but the person who was loyal to her was Matthew Chapel, who became her lover sometime in January 1913. Even though she had an estranged relationship with her parents, she did have strong ties with her sister up until her untimely death in December 1918.

Appearances

 * Haunted  (First appearance)
 * The Girl Who Came Home  (Last appearance) 
 * Golden Girl  (Mentioned only)
 * Angel Wings  (Mentioned only)
 * The Timekeeper's Saga Official Companion Guide  (Mentioned only)

Etymology

 * Louise: is a name with French origins. It is the female equivalent to the name Louis and is a name favored among European royal families, meaning "Renowned fighter" or "Famous warrior".
 * Gladys: derives from the old Welsh named Gwaldus, possibly from the gwald country. Historically, it has been used as a Welsh form of Claudia. Although there is limited information on what the name actually means, the most common meaning "princess" and takes its name from the gladiolus flower of the iris family.
 * Dixon: is a Northern English surname. It is a patronymic from the name Dick, which is a pet form of the name Richard.
 * Seymour: an English name hailing from Normandy. It is a habitational name that refers to St. Maur, a town in France. Although no one is really quite sure what it actually means, most meanings give the name having an English meaning of "mighty at sea".

Trivia

 * Louise's birthday is March 15, which is two days before Christine Lange's birthday, March 17th.
 * Louise is the second Dixon family member to come from outside the United States. The first member is Allan Dixon.
 * In early drafts, Louise did not have a sister; but was an only child.
 * Louise is left handed.
 * Although Louise does not give an explicit reason as to why she ran away, Lange believes it was out of grief over losing her husband and being disowned by her father.
 * Louise is an avid book worm and is seen several times by other characters in Haunted reading books.
 * She can speak at least three languages: French, German, and Latin. She can speak a little bit of Italian, though not very well.
 * Although Louise's officers eventually discovered her real identity, they chose to keep her around due to her medical knowledge and her marksmanship skills.
 * In the Timekeeper Saga Official Companion Guide, Christine Lange reveals that Louise's character was mostly inspired by Mina Murray from NBC's short-lived drama Dracula. As for Louise's fashionable wardrobe, she drew cues from Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey and Rose from the movie, Titanic.  
 * In a diary entry from The Girl Who Came Home, Louise recounted an experience where she got into an argument with her father during her mother's funeral in 1913. Louise went on to say that out of anger, she left her family home, not knowing the last time she would return there was when she came home from the war in 1918.
 * One notable feature about Louise is she always wears her hair up. Whenever it's down, it's at least twenty-two inches long.
 * Never one to drink coffee or tea to stay awake, Louise often ate chocolate to keep her energy up during long shifts in the combat hospitals during the war.
 * Louise was used to eating endless amounts of food, so it was difficult for her to adjust to a rationing, system. Despite all this, her favorite meal to eat was beef stew as it kept her warm during winters in Northern France and Belgium.
 * She took a Christmas vacation with Ralph to St. Petersburg prior to 1912, where they attended a performance of Swan Lake given by the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet.
 * Her favorite color is red.
 * She can sing in perfect pitch.